So you’ve heard of SEO, but maybe you’re not entirely sure exactly what it is. Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines through search results.

A large part of the optimization process involves editing the site’s content and HTML coding in order to increase the site’s relevance for specific keywords. When done properly, this can increase your site’s ranking in the search engines.

The vast majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN (now Bing), and AskJeeves. When most people search for a business online, at the most they will usually only look at the first three pages of results, and probably just the first page. Think of your experience performing a search. How many results did you actually look at? How many pages did you peruse?

So, are you seeing that doing everything you can to get your site to the first page of results is a necessity? If you’re not doing SEO for your site, you can bet that at least some of your competitors are and their customers (your lost customers) are finding their site and not yours.

A good SEO campaign can help generate sales and/or leads and encourage users to sign up for your newsletter, download your white papers, registering for one of your programs, or hopefully, buying something from you. And you will know that they found your site because they typed in a keyword or search directly related to the content of your site.

So maybe you’re thinking, “Well, that doesn’t sound so hard to do. Why can’t I do it myself?” Honestly, the development and implementation of a good SEO campaign involves a great deal of research, which means a lot of time. Improper SEO can lead to even poorer search results or
possibly even being banned from a search engine altogether! Another important point is that the major search engines are constantly changing their methods to keep up with changing technologies. You need to devote a great deal of time to keep up with the ever-changing methods and types of services being offered.

A true SEO professional is what you need. If you are interested in finding out what we can do to help with your SEO campaign, please contact us.

With the increased success of landing page strategies the “homepage” is not necessarily the first or event the most visited page on a website.

A landing page, by definition is the first page a customer lands on when they click through to your website. Now, in the past when most of the focus was on promoting a company’s top level domain name, the “homepage” was indeed the most landed on page. However, as online strategies start to mature and include offline elements, we are now using specialized landing pages to deliver the marketing promise.

A recent test performed on a website by Marketing Experiments showed an improved conversion rate (in this case conversion = sales) of 31.5%. Some of the changes that were implemented to achieve this increase were:

• Changes in the category navigation to use text links instead of images because the images were actually distracting the website visitors
• Repositioning the testimonials to a more prominent location on the page.
• Positioned the “trust” indicator closer to the “Buy” function

If your ready to get your site working for you and would like to find out how to increase the conversions on your site Contact Us Today!

Usability has no sex-appeal when it come to spending money on a new website project. It has no flash, no pizzazz, and certainly no glamor. So why should you, as a website owner, pay any money, let alone attention to this meek & unassuming usability strategy?

Because it will make you money!

A recent survey has found that website usability is up for 2009 vs 2004. This survey found that, averaged across the broad range of sites tested, the success rate had improved well:

• 66% in 2004
• 81% in 2009

“Clearly, Web usability has taken hold in recent years, and Internet managers are getting more reluctant to launch cool sites that waste company money and fail to support the business.”

IA Problems Still Prevent Task Completion

The survey went on to point out that although usabilty is improving the Information architecture of websites continue to stop the website’s users from completing the tasks that they have come to the site for. Bad Information Architecture is the greatest cause of user failure on a website. If the user can’t find it, they can’t complete their task. It really is that simple!

If your website isn’t bringing in the business like it should, contact us for a free consultative meeting to see what can be done.

Here is an interesting concept in user-centered design that was recently posted by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Jakob states that masking passwords can cost companies money because of user-frustration when they attempt to login in to a website and get an error and can’t get into the site. The thought is that because the user only sees asterisks when they type in their passwords, there is a great chance that they are simply misspelling their password but because they can’t see what they are typing, they are unaware of the misspelling and become frustrated with the site.

Originally, the masked password concept was developed to eliminate the potential of having a password “stolen” by someone looking over your shoulder while you are typing your password into a webpage. The argument is: how often is someone looking over your shoulder when you are typing in a password; could you simply stop typing if someone sneaks up behind you; if someone was really standing behind you, couldn’t they make note of the keys you are pressing? Is there enough concern over someone standing behind you when you are typing in a password to jeopardize the usability of a website?

The practice of masking passwords has become a standard from the earliest days of web development and we’ve come a long way in terms of better understanding User Centered Design (UCD) and the value that a strong UCD can provide to a company.

The flow of a good site is not unlike the flow in your house from room to room.  If it works, you don’t really notice or think about it.  It makes moving around simple.  Your website should be that way too.  Your site navigation should allow the user to move from page to page without walking into a wall, or a bad link.  They shouldn’t have to guess where the page they’re looking for might be.  Any problems could lead them to think, “At least I know where the door is” and then they’re outta there. 

Two of the most important questions when working on your site are: What is the site structure and what is the task your user is trying to achieve?  This all leads back to understanding user personas and common tasks.  Understanding these things is vital to the success of your site.  You truly need to get to the bottom line of why this person is at your site to begin with. 

What does my site have that they can only get from me?  What tasks are they going to need to accomplish in order to meet that goal?  Finding the answers could have a great impact on your conversion rate. 

Is your site easy to navigate?  If I find myself on a certain page, will I be able to find my way back to where I started?  This also ties into the idea of keeping things simple. 

Creating flow through your website will enable your site visitors to comfortably enjoy your site without bumping into anything along the way.  

Although we usually use our blog to give strategy tips, industry news, and our general humble opinions, I wanted to take a moment and welcome our latest partners that we will be working with.  They are:

Kelly Manor Assisted Living

Kelly Manor provides professional and reliable health services to their clients.  Surrounded by trees on a large country site, this beautiful alternative to a nursing home, provides a true home setting for its residents. 

The new website will not only showcase the many special aspects of what Kelly Manor does for their clients, but will feature photos of the community along with upcoming news and events.

Genesee County Humane Society

Genesee Humane Society shelters and cares for dogs, cats as well as many other  as they transition into loving homes. 

The new website will not only showcase the many programs the Human Society offers, but will also offer information on pet care, pet supplies and spay/neuter assistance.  There will also be listings of pets currently up for adoption.

Convergence LLC

Convergence provides consulting services for a secure environment to business of all sizes.  The new site will host company information as well as providing contact information, latest news, and more.

Softaire Diffusers

Softaire Diffusers provides an innovative solution to creating a uniform room temperature and ultimately eliminating hot or cold spots as well as drafts. 

If you have ate at a restaurant, you very well may have felt the comfort of their product without even knowing it.

Information about various models and products will be shown on the new website along with performance data and testimonials.

Skin Renewal Clinic

Skin Renewal Clinic has been helping their diverse clientele look their best for years.  They are now looking to broaden their reach online.

Along with offering information about their business and contact information, the new site will also offer valuable coupons for site visitors.

Gunslinger

Gunslinger offers a large variety of Airsoft guns, gear and accessories.   We will be working with their team to help increase their rankings in search engines to allow them to reach more people and increase sales.

We are really excited about working with our newest partners and if you would like to see how we can help you, get a hold of us… we would love to chat!

Have you ever attended a networking event, asked someone what they do and then stand there, dumbfounded for the next 5 minutes while the go on and on trying to explain what they do?!?! Then, to add to the agony, upon the completion of their long-winded explanation, you still don’t have any idea what they do and your sure not going to ask them to clarify…nope, your just going to turn and run!

Then same think happens on website across the Internet every single day, possibly even your site. if a prospective customer lands on your website, can they determine what it is that your company does and where, on your site they need to go to get the information or to accomplish the task that they came to your site for; all under 8 seconds? That’s right, under 8 seconds, because thats about all the time you will have before they close their browser and go away!

The content of your site is one of the single most important elements there is to your website and unfortunately, usually the one element to your site that gets the least amount of attention. If your “working” your website and making continuing improvements you will, most likely, make changes to the navigation, design, new pages, and make changes to forms before you ever make any changes to the content. Lets face it, there is nothing fun about content so it usually never gets changed.

Figure out what you Value Proposition is and then post it on your website where your prospective customers will be able to read it QUICKLY, understand it and commit to doing business with you.

Many things go into designing a website before you ever get to the process of actually coding and launching it.  There are several stages in the overall web design process of including discovery, which is where we find out as much as possible about the company you are designing for.  But what are the other parts of the discovery process?  What comes next? 

A vital part of the process comes from creating Web Personas, which play a large role in tailoring a site to the needs of those most likely to use it.  If you are developing a site whose main demographic is seniors, it will be quite different from one aimed at teens. 

Obviously, more than one persona is needed, as there will be many types of site visitors.  Trying to customize the site for various types of visitors to make the site as user-friendly as possible is the goal of this stage of the web design process. 

 Your primary persona should be the most common type of user; this is your key demographic.  Building this web persona depends on many things, such as: age, gender, education, and occupation, as well as goals, needs, and motivation.  Understanding the needs and goals of this type of user will greatly improve the accessibility of the site. 

This leads to the next step of Task-Based Segmentation, which is working to adapt the site to the users most common goals in coming to the site.  Why are they at the site in the first place?  What are they looking for?  Making things easy to find for the user will help keep them coming back to the site and hopefully get them to spread the word to their friends that your site is the place to visit for this type of information. 

When designing the site, you must keep all these things in mind.  Not only will recurring clients be visiting the site, but new ones as well.  You need to understand what brought them there to entice them to buy from you.  These stages are key to the success of the web design process.

Congratulations, you made the leap to start using email as a marketing tool! After all, it’s inexpensive, you can segment your list and easily send a targeted message to each list, and best of all, you get reports on how well your marketing campaign worked! Isn’t technology wonderful?
So, off you go into this amazing new Wonderland of marketing bliss. The first month of your new marketing campaign you write a dazzling article for your email blast; send it out and wait for the stampede to come through your front door. Ok, no stampede, yet.
The second month of your marketing campaign comes and you write your second article, though this time it’s not quite as dazzling because, after all, you have other responsibilities and you didn’t get a single sale the last time you sent out an email blast, and look at how much time you put into that. You certainly won’t let that happen again.
So as the months progress you realize that you are only getting a 25% open rate. What’s going on here? Why are 75% of my subscribers not even opening the email? First, you need to stop freaking out and realize that the primary benefit of an email marketing campaign is to create an ongoing communication with a targeted audience. They signed up for a reason; they are interested in your company. But maybe not right now.
Think about your sell cycles before you condemn your email open rates. Do you sell something to your customers every month? If your not a grocery store, there is a pretty good chance that the recipients of your email message just may not be in the buy cycle for your product or service. Think about it this way, if your selling glasses and I typically purchase glasses once every 12 - 15 months, I’ll most likely open email information on glasses for the 2 months before I purchase and probably for the month after I purchase; and that will be about it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like you, it certainly doesn’t mean that I’m not going to buy from you and I sure won’t be unsubscribing from your email messages because when I’m in the buy cycle, I’m very interested in what you have to say.

I was reading a the summary of a recent survey of industrial companies that are increasing their online efforts.

“Marketers at industrial companies spent a greater portion of their marketing budget online in 2008 than last year, and despite the economic downturn, 38% expect to spend a larger amount this year on marketing as they continue to migrate dollars to online tactics, according to a survey by GlobalSpec.”

The survey went on to say that the marketing executives at these companies are planning on spending over 50% of their marketing budget for online initiatives. Here’s the real surprise, that figure is up from 20% last year. Amazing commitment to online results.

It’s not uncommon for clients to ask us how much they should be budgeting for their online efforts, whether that is put toward their website, email marketing, search marketing or any one of the many other online opportunities. Though every industry and every business is different, according to this survey, the industrial sector of US businesses have determined a budget for online strategy!

It used to be that web developers would load up as much of the latest and exciting technology into a website, just because they could. We all remember the splash pages (pages that would load before you could get into the site and forced you to watch some “graphical” movie). Sure, cramming all of the latest technology demonstrates the ability of the developer, however, it frequently does nothing for the visitor other than to confuse or frustrate them. We all know by now that if we confuse or frustrate them, they will leave.

The laws of customer-centric design stipulates that every element of an online system is there for one purpose…to support the customer. If a splash page (my pet peeve) does nothing to make the customer experience easier, faster, or more engaging then DON”T DO IT! It really is that simple.

So how can you make sure that your online system is customer-centric? Start by identifying who your customer(s) is/are and how they use technology. Then make sure that everything about your system is there specifically for your customer. Look at everything from the navigation of your site to the labels that you use for your navigation (just because the word you use makes sense doesn’t guarantee that your visitor will understand what your trying to tell them).

Customer-centric has become so important to all aspects of software design and development, especially with online systems, that the US Government has even started to get involved in how software interacts with people from areas like voting to procurement systems.

Ironically, despite the value that customer-centric processes promise for companies, during times like these when the economy starts to tighten up, the “enthusiasm” for customer-centric projects falls off dramatically because of the perceived increased cost that would be associated with creating a system that is customer-centric. Unfortunately, just the opposite is true!

Does your online system (website, email marketing, intranet, etc) cater to your customers? Are you getting all you can out of your online system? How do you know? Contact Us Today!

rel e vant

adjective
closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand : the candidate’s experience is relevant to the job.

It doesn’t matter if your talking about Search Marketing eMail Marketing or Visitor Conversions, there is no more important concept to focus on that the relevancy of your content.

Search Marketing & Relevance: If you want top billing for organic optimization, there are a lot of factors that go into that equation. In fact Google’s algorithms are what folk lore are made of. We really never will know all that they look at to determine how to rank a website’s page, however, we do know that the end sum for all of the calculations they make on a page are to improve the relevancy of the results that they give you when you type in a search phrase. The more relevant your website is for the phrases you want to show up for, the better your odds.

eMail Marketing & Relevance: Do you want the people receiving your monthly email newsletter, announcement, or product information to keep receiving these messages? Do you want them to follow the link in your email message and go back to your site to buy your product? Of course you do! So how can you increase the odds of them doing that? Make sure that the information in your message is relevant for the people that are receiving it. Don’t send a message for a sale on women’s shoes to the men on your list!

Visitor Conversions & Relevance: Ok, here is the holy grail. You have a website because you want it to accomplish something…right? More sales, more leads, more members, something…it has to do something! I know, right now there are a bunch of you going “duh! of course” but let me say that the more I talk to business owners the less obvious this last statement is.
Anyway, I digress. If you want to get visitors to your website to “convert” you have to make sure that they are reading content, looking at products, or signing up for an email blast that is relevant to their interests. Make sure that if your driving traffic from somewhere else (search engines, directories, interactive ads) that you drop them off in an area of your site that they will find relevant.

Whew!!! Seems like a lot of work and a lot of stuff to remember doesn’t it. Not necessarily. If you lay out a relevant strategy for using your website you will find it very easy. Are you like most business owners that we talk to; you see how this could benefit your business but your just not sure where to start? Contact Us Today…We Can Help!

I just talked to a business owner that told me, and I quote, “I ain’t spendin no money on that Internet thing!”. Then, this morning I read an article on local interactive strategies that started with the phrase “We’re not here to preach the value of having a website. You already know about that.” My experience is that “we” don’t already know that.

I’ve been promoting Interactive/Internet strategies for about 12 years now and I am continually dumb-founded by the lack of understanding about how the Internet can and will benefit virtually every business. Now I fully get the fact that there are going to be business owners that just refuse to get pro-active with any aspect of their business. The people that confuse me are the one’s that go after opportunities in other areas (i.e. offline marketing) and refuse to add the Internet to their tool box. We really do know that this stuff works!

In this article that I referenced, there was the following information “In a recent study by ROI Research Inc. and Performics on the offline impact of internet search, 55 percent to 65 percent of respondents said that search is at least somewhat influential in purchases they make at retail locations. That number is on the way up. Beyond retail products, more consumers are looking for local services online as well. The same goes for other businesses seeking local partners, suppliers and services.

It really is time to sit down and take a hard look at what you want to do with your business and how the Interactive space can benefit. If your unsure where to turn or how to get started, just give us a call.

Used to be that the only page you had to worry about was the home page for your website. All of your traffic was driven to this page, all of your optimization efforts were done on this page and for the most part the only metric you cared about was the home page “hits”. Well…that was a very long time ago.

Today, with the improvements of search algorithm, more detailed online marketing strategies and a more sophisticated user, the home page often isn’t even noticed by your users. Its not uncommon for a user to come to one of your pages (not the home page) directly from a search result. If that happens to your users, will they be able to pick-up on the fact that this page is for your company? Will they be able to complete the task that they came for, without seeing your homepage first?

If your not confident that all of the pages within your website are properly laid out and optimized for all of your visitors, you could be missing very large opportunities. It may be time to take a serious look at your website strategy to make sure that it is in line with how people are using sites, today! If you would like more information on how to make sure your strategy is up-to-date, contact us TODAY!

One of the items that we council a lot of our clients on is how to generate higher placement on search engines. This practice is referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are millions of factors that go into the rankings of sites on search engines, especially Google, but one item that has stayed true is the fact that new, fresh content will consistently help you. This can be a challenge to any company to develop this new content on an ongoing basis.

There are some items that you are most likely already doing however that you can simply repurpose for the web. For instance, press releases. At 3Sixty Interactive we send out press releases for new client wins, promotions, site launches, etc. On average we send about 2 per week…. yes we struggle at the consistency or new content as well but are always trying. These press releases provide for lots of new content. We are able to add 2 new articles every single week.

Another item that your organization may produce is a monthly newsletter. The information from that newsletter could simply be republished online for people to read. New content also gives visitors a reason to come back to your site. Without a reason to come to your site, visitors won’t. People no longer have time to just “surf”, they now are going online for a purpose.

So next time you are developing that piece to be mailed out, or company newsletter, ask yourself, could this be republished online? If so, get it out there. After all, the purpose of developing the content is to get it to as many people as possible.