SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

Succeed Online

Around March of this year we saw decreased Google traffic coming to tried-and-true content that had brought us solid traffic for years. Things continued to decrease and we decided to investigate the cause. It appears that Google's use of dates in the SERPs had a markedly negative impact on our clickthrough rates.

About a month ago I read Graywolf's article that talked about removing dates from your blog/article posts. He said:

My recommendation is to remove any and all dates from the page after 3-6 months. Removing the post date from the article meta information area is easy. If you have comments, you have to monkey with the code to remove the date, or you can go hardcore and turn them off entirely. You need to remove any traces of publication dates from the page.

Now that is a very interesting recommendation based on the assumption that google likes fresh content. We decided to put it to the test and we removed dates from all posts that were older than 3 months old and the results were amazing. Within 7 days Google had removed the dates from 95% of our posts in the SERPs. We also removed all dates from the comments that were older than three months old as well.

We tracked our Google referals for the month and we saw dramatic increases in traffic to our older content that ranks well, but was being affected by the negative older post date. Our Google traffic increased 8% immediately after the dates were removed from the SERPs and traffic continues to increase.

Case in point, was when I linked to an article from a comment I made on someone else's blog. Another commentor asked "why are you linking to a post made back in 2006?" The content was still valid even though the post date was over 4 years ago. It just reinforced my determination to remove older post dates from all of my blog posts.

As a side note. Graywolf mentioned a situation where Google appeared to be grabbing the post date from comments to put as the date it included in the SERPs. We also saw this happen on a few of our posts as well. We tracked it for a while and it appears that Google has tweaked the way it handles getting post dates from comments, because after about 3 weeks, those posts that had grabbed the date from the comments also had their dates removed in the SERPs.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/175

Succeed Online

Online e-commerce done correctly.

I was very impressed with Utrecht Art's confirmation page (and a few other nice things about the way they do their online shopping experience.

1. Provide promo code on their site. (and had it prepopulate the promo code once you get to the checkout page)
2. Best sellers for each and every category, not just sitewide.

3. Simple two item signup/registration form after the confirmation page.

On site Promotion Codes

The first thing that I loved was that they gave out a promotion code for 20% of any of their normally in-stock items. And then not only did they give you the code, but once you got to the checkout page, the code was already typed into the promotion code box, how user-friendly is that?

Category Best Sellers

Next they had "best sellers" in every category. Not just a couple of items for site-wide, but within each category, which made picking out the "most common" items a cinch.

Post Checkout Signup Process

Last they did user registration the correct way. Only two fields, and after the checkout process. Plus they list some great reasons to signup (one of which includes a 10% promotion code which I know will work because I have already had success with their last promotion code.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/174

Search engine usage and statistics for April 2010.

The Nielsen Company reported their findings for April 2010. Here are their top results.

While Google dropped a half of a percentage point from last years numbers, Bing is the big gainer with a 4% increase of overall market share. Bing has eaten away at Yahoo's share and is getting close to passing them by. AOL has continued to lose market share as well. It appears that Yahoo's choice to outsource their search engine results to Bing has been a part of their loss in rankings as well as some people switching to Bing's cleaner look.

Bing still has a mountain to climb while facing down Google. We'll have to see if the relationship between Microsoft and Facebook help to sway users away from Google.

How to accept credit cards online without a machine (by using a merchant gateway account from Authorize.net with free setup) and not using PayPal.

First off you need to know that I get hundreds of calls a year trying to convince me to switch credit card processors (or switch merchant gateways) to accept credit card payments online. However, I've never found a company that can beat the rates of FreeAuthNet (Capital Merchant Solutions). They have simply unbeatable rates.

I've had lots of customers tell me that their bank can help them process credit cards online, or their current swipe credit card machine company will say they do online credit cards as well. Unfortunately, most companies that do swipe machines are built around a different "risk" model (card present) instead of online ("card not present") scenarios. So, normally they will give you a decent rate for card present and kill you in fees and high rates for online transactions.

FreeAuthNet has great rates (and they just lowered their rates) for online credit card processing. I've sent many customers to them and have yet found another company that could match them on their rates. We have even worked out a deal with them to get additional discounts for our customers and help with high monthly minimum charges.

I could tell you many great stories about FreeAuthNet but I'll just quote a bit from starreviews

We really liked the fact that FreeAuthNet.com caters to Internet clientele. For so long, so many credit card processing services didn't understand the needs of online businesses. FreeAuthNet.com doesn't only understand the needs of the companies that conduct business on the Web, that is the niche market they specifically cater to.

One thing that makes FreeAuthNet.com quite unique is the fact that it caters to online businesses, not brick-and-mortar establishments. Most credit card processing companies offer online credit card processing as a side-service. FreeAuthNet.com makes this niche of the payment processing sector its core clientèle.

They are definitely one of the best credit card processing services for online businesses in need of affordable credit card processing services.

FreeAuthNet.com offers customer service via email and phone. To send an email we simply had to fill out the site's user-friendly email form and click "send". We received a helpful response the very next day. Phone support was also very helpful, providing us with in-depth answers to each and every question we asked. The fact that there was literally no hold time whatsoever was an added plus.

Sign up today for an Authorize.net Account

Normally I tell clients not to sign up for the CheckMan software or the added swipe machine. Since you will be using a credit card virtual terminal (if you aren't just using our custom e-commerce shopping cart) to do your transactions. Just get the basic package and if you have any questions, I'd love to answer them. Just give us a call at 208.419.0868.

I've had many people ask why I don't recommend PayPal. I've never been an advocate for PayPal. I've heard way too many first hand horror stories about PayPal freezing accounts (accounts with millions of dollars in them) and businesses going out of business. I wouldn't trust PayPal with any of my money let alone $0.02.

Unique search strings accounted for more traffic than all search strings that more than 100 people searched for combined (including keyword sets that had thousands of searches).

Quantifying the Long Tail of Search. We did some data crunching the other day on all of the Google traffic we received for one site in 2009. Here are some interesting takeways.

• Unique Keyword Sets (or search phrases that occured exactly once during the year) accounted for 27.8% of all searches, while keyword sets that sent only two visitors accounted for an additional 15.2%. Combined these equaled 43% of all searches received.
• All Keyword sets that sent at least 100 visitors accounted for 23.4% of all searches. This means that more people performed unique searches than all of the search strings combined that had over 100 people search for them. People are performing longer and more specific keyword searches than before.
  
• Unique Keyword Sets accounted for 71.4% of all keyword sets.
• Keyword sets that sent only two visitors accounted for 19.6% of all keyword sets. When combined with unique keyword sets these account for 91% of all keyword sets.
• The longest keyword set we saw was 144 words long. That is a long query string to type into Google.
  
• The average keyword set length was 5.7 words.
• The mode keyword set length was 4 words.
• Not surprisingly, unique keywords sets tended to be longer than searches that occurred more often.
  

Takeaways from Bryan Eisenberg's talk at SES London 2010.

So what do the best converting websites have in common?

1. Communicate unique value proposition – You have 7 seconds to persuade (or 8-10 seconds if you have really, really good content). Establish credibility on every landing page.
2. Make persuasive & relevant offers – He suggests free shipping. From experience at Dell, free shipping made most profit and greatest sales. Conversion rate doubled for overstock.com However, if you listen to other advice. Free shipping might just erode existing profits. Make sure you test, test, test.
   
3. Reinforce the offer sitewide – Don't let them forget your offer. Message must be persuasive and appear consistently. 
4. They maintain the scent – Maintain consistent look feel of the campaign. Landing page text should reflect the original offer. The same style and call to action should flow until they have converted.
   
5. Make a strong first impression - Everyone knows the cliche - You only get one chance to make a first impression. I would add that you should make your first impression impossible to miss.
   
6. They appeal to multiple personas or segments - Talks about the four different personality types and that you need to market to each of them.
   
7. They don’t do slice and dice optimisation - You don't have time to test everything. You will also turn off a lot of potential customers if you test too many awful ideas. Look at the different personality types and create a valid hypothesis and then test that. Test for impact and not variation.
8. Use the voice of the customer – Social Commerce – People are huge followers. They feel much more at ease with a purchase that others have made and had a good experience with. Just think of those telecommercials and why they do so well. People need to hear from people like them. Figleaves improved conversion by 35% by implementing reviews.
9. They use Social Commerce for navigation – Helps people figure out what product is right for them
10. They use Social Commerce for promoting – Use reviews everywhere. Not just the product page, but in email campaigns as well.
    
11. And for credibility! - Let others do the selling for you.
    
12. And for feedback and research – Cheaper than usability labs
13. Use persuasion principles like scarcity - “Low Stock!” Or add call to actions that automatically end after X number of days from today.
    
14. Make your forms engaging – Why make people register pre-checkout. Why not do this on the thank-you page? Or at the same time as checkout?
15. Provide point of action assurances - “Guaranteed response within 2 hours!”
16. They keep customers in the process – Hold your hand and guide you through the complete process.
    
17. Consider email previews - Look at how your email will look with and without images.
    
18. Budget for experience – Keep focusing on continuous improvement
19. Utilize a system for prioritization – There is never enough time so work out what resources you need or just change little by little
20. Make data driven decisions! Do web analytics correctly by making a to-do lists regularly!
21. Know how to execute rapidly – Have contingency to act fast if the opportunity arise

5 Final Action Steps

1. Identify problems
2. Create the to-do list
3. Document the change hypothiseis
4. Prioritise this to-do list
5. Start testing and do the same next time.

Muiltvariate testing we help quickly increase conversions. Here are the four simple steps to implement multivariate testing.

We recently wrote a from the ground up, multivariate testing package to use with all of our upcoming websites. We've always believed in testing, testing, testing, and the iterative design process. However, normal split AB testing has become too slow at adapting to the speed of change necessary to keep margins high and conversions up. So we've jumped on the multivariate testing bandwagon and developed a quick way to test multiple changes at once.

Multivariate testing is nothing more than testing more than one (multi) change (variable) at the same time. Normally the scientific process tells us to only change one thing, test, and then evaluate results. Unfortunately this method is much too slow to be effective online. Plus we can see how multiple elements add or detract from one another in a quicker fashion.

The Multivariate Testing Process

The multivariate testing process is quite simple to understand.

1. First you want to keep the experience consistent for the individual user, so you need a way to identify specific users and provide them with the same variables every time. Setting cookies or session varaibles for the user allows you to track and consistently display the same information to User X.
2. Next you need a way to track which variables were shown to User X. We rewrote our tracking software to add the different variables to the stats of User X so we know that they were shown Heading A, Copy C, and Call to Action B while User Y was shown Heading B Copy C and Call to Action A.
3. Third you need a way to identify success. Whether that is making it to a specific page, or signing up for a newsletter, or staying on the site for X amount of time. And each success needs to be linked to the specific test you are running.
4. Last you need a way to compile successes and adapt to the findings. As you view your findings you can immediately remove ineffective variables from the test and replace them with modifications of the effective variables and rerun the test. 

After building our testing package we immediately put it to the test. The amount of data you can collect is amazing. We've started with some simple changes and have loved the results so far. We will be heavily using multivariate testing in our new sites to identify more precisely how users react to specific varaibles.

Getting Off to a Good Start

Now, I'm not going to jump on the "we don't know anything until we've tested" bandwagon. I think it is a cop out. Good designers know good design when they see it. Good programmers know good programming when they see it. There are still basic "rules" that can be followed to improve conversions. The trick is to start testing good versus better scenarios instead of bad versus bad versus bad.

Increase landing page conversions with these simple tips.

Increasing conversions is a big topic lately. Here are some more great ideas from ioninteractive for increasing conversions on your landing pages for this year.

• Keep your Organic and PPC landing pages separate. Targeted traffic from PPC have been given a very specific hook. Make sure you build a complete page around that specific hook.
• Stand Out. While you should use well-known and tried-and-true placement for elements on your landing pages, you need to make sure that your page doesn't just blend in with all the other landing pages the person has seen that day.
• Test, test, test. Multivariate testing is becoming the norm. I can assure you that you don't know your customers as well as you think you do. Let them make the decision on what works best for them.
• Keep them there. Do whatever you can to give them all the information they need without needing to leave the page. Use in-page javascript windows to provide great information while keeping the call to action right there in front of them the whole time.
• Target and segment. I read a great article the other day about segmenting your audience. Mac users think, act, and behave differently than PC users. Chrome users think, act, and behave differently than IE 6 users. There are tons of ways to segment your users and provide very specific information for them.
• Video. Video has consistently increased in effectiveness and enticement over the past couple of years. People now expect it.
• Help people socialize about you. Allowing people to quickly share information through twitter, email, facebook, you name it will get your message out even faster and increase brand awareness.
  

Six ways to increase usability and conversions.

There are many ways that you can increase conversions. Here is a list of usability items to fix that will help increase conversions.

• Visitors can't find what they want. Provide an easy navigation as well as a search function for your site. Then make sure you track what people are searching for and make sure it takes them to the best possible page or product.
• Your site takes forever to load. Cut back on some of the bandwidth heavy images and animations. People are very impatient. Remember that slow load time is the number one reason 51% of people leave websites.
• Don't leave them hanging. Dead end pages and under construction pages are a complete let down. It is better to not get their hopes up and then dash them to pieces. Don't orphan pages and just leave pages that aren't finished completely off the site.
• Stick to commonly used words and locations. Calling things by cute names or company specific terminology only confuses and slows a users progress. Keep it simple. Keep it straightforward.
• Small fonts. The majority of online purchases come from people aged 35-65. Small fonts make it difficult for older users.
• Using flash or javascript for your call to action. Some users don't have them installed (or can't... thanks Apple). Make sure you provide a way for those without those features to still convert.
  

Easy and simple steps to increase landing page conversions and ROI.

You've brought people to your site through great SEO or PPC, but now what. What can you do to help make sure that those people buy?

Here are some simple ideas from EMC to increase landing page conversions.

1. Include an image along with the offer for visual appeal. Make sure that the image reinforces your branding and product.
   
2. Reduce or eliminate navigation to keep visitors focused on the goal and reduce distraction. You want to funnel them toward your goal. Don't give them multiple exits. Use in-page modal windows to give them additional information without removing them from the page.
   
3. Keep the look and feel consistent with your primary website so consumers immediately recognize your brand. Consistancy is the key.
   
4. Use a compelling call to action that ties in to the offer. For example, the copy for a retail promotional offer could have a call to action such as, "Buy Now and Save 10 Percent." Make it a must have, must have now! offer.
   
5. Minimize data collection as much as possible to decrease abandonment. If you must collect additional information, try moving those fields to a form on a second page. For example, if you want customers to register with your site, why not make the registration part of your confirmation page. They have finished shopping, and now have time to "divert attention" to something else.
   
6. Whenever asking for personal information, include privacy and security statements to help establish trust and remove hesitancy from the point of action. People want to make sure you don't sell their info or spam them to death. A clear policy helps you and your customers be on the same page.

The main point is to get out of your customer's way. Anything that keeps them from quickly purchasing is a downfall to any retail site.