Social Media at Its Best

If you have a Facebook account, I’m sure you’ve recently noticed the influx of celebrity pictures showing up in your friends list.  That would be due to Facebook’s Doppelganger (the ghostly double of a living person) Week.  I went through the motions of creating my own celebrity-look-alike and was crushed by the results:

Of all the people in the world, I look most like Titanic co-star Kate Winslet…  To further crush my hopes and dreams of ever having a future as a male model; I discovered that additionally I am a pedigree of a Child Actor, a British Prime Minister, a Flamboyant Las Vegas Entertainer and an American Politician with a penchant for screaming.  I honestly don’t know which one can be considered the worst.

While I sit here pondering what went wrong, the company hosting this service (as well as the Facebook app relating to this) is reaping the benefits.

Myheritage is a website specializing in family tree creation and interactive Genealogy.

Referring to Alexa Site Statistics for myheritage.com you can see colossal leaps in site traffic and activity across the board.  Specifically in the past 7 days they have experienced:

• 53% growth  in User Reach
• 114% more Page Views
• 22% more Time on Site
• 115% increase in Search Engine Traffic
• Bounce Rate has dropped 8%
• Gained 1340 positions in Alexa’s Rankings into the top 1000 websites in terms of traffic

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myheritage.com#trafficstats

Their social media presence on Facebook has inherently fed their organic search results for related terms such as facial recognition and celebrity look alike.

Brilliantly, they are also building a large user base through this process as repeated use of the celebrity generators requires a username and password, which also completes most of the information for your genealogy tree, which of course is their core product.

Whether myheritage.com was behind this well executed marketing scheme or not, it’s safe to say they capitalized on the opportunity and are reaping the social media rewards.

Forms: Making them Better

More often than not, the form is overlooked and rushed; with the thought “as long as it’s in there, it’ll work.”  But why?  Why would you drag your customers through the mud to buy a product or contact you when instead you could send them through Disneyland for a magnificent experience!  As stated, the form can be many things, such as a buying or customer service experience.  So why not make that experience as good as it can be, so that they’ll look back on it and you positively!

Here are some simple steps to help you conquer forms:

• Style your form!
  • CSS works on form elements, such as form, input, label, button, etc… you can fully customize these. Don’t overdo it, just aim for clean.  Clean = Professional, Professional = Trust.

• Try not to use tables.
  • They’re detrimental to usability as screen readers cannot identify elements in them.  They really shouldn’t be used for layout purposes in this day and age, use them for tabular data as they were originally designed for.

• If it’s huge, break it up.
  • Generally if you have more than 10 fields or are dropping below the fold, it is good practice to break this information up onto multiple pages or into steps.  This helps to avoid overwhelming a client, and can make for a less painful form experience.
  • Amazon’s buying process is a great example of this.

• Validation is great.  Too much is annoying.
  • Definitely cover server side validation to avoid sql injection.  Don’t overdo field validation as it can impede people through your form process.

• Use label tags.
  • Labels provide usability hinting for the browser, thus helping ease users through your form process.
• Reassure your customers.
  • When you are collecting sensitive data, make it clear that you are using it explicitly for business purposes.  The internet can be a frightening place and it means a lot to customers.

Need a form with all these options fast?

Nothing beats a homemade customized form. But if you aren’t versed in web languages or are simply in a hurry Wufoo and jotform offer well made forms with a drag and drop interface, as well as hosting on their own servers(so you don’t have to get down and dirty with the backend).

<!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> <!–[endif]–>

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>Need a clean form fast and free?

Thoughts about Small Business and Web2.0

 With the addition of Webmaster John to our team, that got us thinking about web development and small business.  “I got one, but now what do I do with it?“

 Some thought provoking statistics from Nielson Net Ratings and Foresee Result groups:

• When shopping for a product or service, 73% of consumers use search engines to find local businesses from which to buy.
• Search engines are the first source to which consumers turn to find local businesses (31%), ahead of even print yellow pages (30%).
• Over 77% of people said they were more likely to make a purchase from an unfamiliar business with a quality Web site than a poor Web site from a known business
• Nearly 40% of multi-channel shoppers prefer to use the web for browsing and researching their purchases. Of this group, 71% complete their purchase in the store.
• On every key measure driving satisfaction, retailers’ websites are better at producing satisfied customers than traditional stores are.

Thought 1:  Poorly designed websites perform badly in search engines.  If 73% of potential customers are using search engines to find you, can your website be found?  Was SEO/SEM a consideration when the website was first conceived?

 Thought 2:  Is your site easily navigable.  Are your visitors vexed by unorganized pages and unfindable information?

• Is the layout organized well?
• Do pages load quickly?
• Is the color scheme appealing, and does it suit your target market?
• Is it easy to navigate?
• Are customers’ potential questions answered for them on the site?
• Is your ordering process simple enough?
• Can customers find your site with a simple keyword search?

Thought 3:  Who’s watching the “store”?   You’ve spent the time and money on your website.  Don’t leave it alone.  You need to understand your return on investment and understand if it was worth it.  Statistics help you understand your customers experience on your site.  Do your visitors look at a couple of pages, then get to “x” page and leave?  What does that mean to you?  Are they finding out that you aren’t offering what they need, or maybe there just isn’t enough information to push them further.  Watch for trends, and make changes as needed.  Keep track and keep your eye on the stats.

 A properly laid out web design plan that incorporates design and SEM is key to answering the thoughts above.

Localize your Google

Last week we talked about Yahoo Neighbors, and how you can leverage it for local search.  Yahoo Neighbors can help local businesses in cities across the US to gain traction in local search results and potentially evolve into a default best practice for all small and local businesses.

 Today, let’s discuss the Google Local Business Center.

 If you’re a local business owner, it’s clear that Google helps customers find you. Not just by using Google search to find out about you, but Google Maps as well, so they can get to you in multiple different ways.  Now, imagine if there were a way for you to get a better understanding of how those customers are finding you.  What Keywords did they use to search for you?  Where are they coming from, did they drive across town just to try your huge selection of pasta dishes?  If you recently started offline advertising in a particular newspaper or coupon service, what happens to the traffic?  Was it successful, or perhaps didn’t quite meet your expectations?  If you had access to that kind of information, would it help you make better decisions in regards to how you apply your marketing dollars and how you would drive your traffic so you can attract more customers?

 

 

 

The Google LBC tool was launched back in June 2009,(www.google.com/lbc). The LBC is a free tool that enables business owners to control the content in their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps.

Once you sign up, Google populates a dashboard for claimed listings with data from the last 30 days.  New information is added every day, so make sure to check frequently. 

How is this different from my Google Analytics account (or other web tracking tool)?  Well, before now, you could track usage metrics on your website using a tool like Google Analytics, but data about how customers found you through your local listing never got back to you.  All you have to do is claim your listing in the LBC and go through a quick verification process to get access to the following kinds of data:

• Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
• Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business’ website or requested driving directions to the business.
• Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for “tea” or “coffee”?
• Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.

The Google LBC dashboard:

 

It’s just one more tool that can help you target local search data and make informed decisions on what is working for you, and what isn’t. 

And that’s good information to have.

Small and Local Businesses, Meet your Neighbors – on Yahoo Local

Search and social marketing continue to cross paths and merge together as the internet industry expands and evolves to fit our needs.  Yahoo Neighbors is a conversation based tool that has the potential to do great things for small and local businesses by opening up a Q & A within the local business space.  While us search engine marketers have known about the influence of local search (such as Yahoo Local) and Q & A sites, like Yahoo Answers for a long time; Yahoo Neighbors is essentially a hybrid of the two concepts and conveniently brings the power of locality to smaller cities that Yahoo Answers lacks, in addition to adding a social element to local search that wasn’t there before.

In most scenarios, Yahoo Neighbors will help local businesses in cities across the US to gain traction in local search results and potentially evolve into a default best practice for all small and local businesses.

• Designed by search engine forward thinking minds, so naturally SEO credibility will come into play.
• Helps to promote website visibility through conversation, Q & A and quasi-reviews.
• Helps build and establish website and business presence and authority in the market.
• Highly useful for reputation monitoring and management.
• Has the potential to translate well to Social Media with the addition of sharing functionalities.

Yahoo Neighbors is in essence a community based Q & A, coupled with SEO value (Yahoo properties are designed by SEO-inclined folks and Yahoo Answers already ranks well in SERPs) and RSS attributes.  Not only could this tool become a large source of referral traffic for local businesses, but companies can also use it as a Reputation Management tool by opting into RSS feeds for specific categories and even more granularly down to a single topic.  Get social media sharing functionalities in place, and Yahoo might really have something.  The only catch?  Yahoo Neighbors is still in beta format, and although it has officially launched and is available nationwide, most cities have yet to establish good content and user participation.  Until the Yahoo Neighbor wave gains momentum with local searchers, smaller cities will have to wait a little longer to see Neighbors in action and to decide how to grab value from its offerings.