Give Away Information on Your Website, and Get Visitors to Come Back (& Convert!)
B2B Marketers walk a fine line when it comes to what information they give away and what information requires visitors to register first. Give away too much, and you are at a loss to track successful KPIs (key performance indicators) and potentially lose the prospect when they leave your site. Put everything behind a registration form, and you run the risk of alienating your prospects before they even hit the “submit” button, for prying into their personal space. What’s a marketer to do? My philosophy has always been: if the information you have is about your product, service, or brand,… [more]
Is There Anyone Out There? – How to Define Blog Engagement
More and more businesses are seeing the vital importance of having a blog as a means on content development, communication, and thought leadership. There are many hurdles to overcome when creating a blog, including strategy, focus, editorial, and time management. It can be discouraging to put all this time, effort and resources into your blog, only to see post after post without comments. You don’t want to be writing content in a vacuum, do you? But comments aren’t the best way to define engagement. In fact, depending on the content of the post, comments may not even be appropriate. There… [more]
Long web pages are okay! 4 ways to convince your visitor to scroll down the page
SEO experts have long been saying your ideal web or blog page length should be between 200-250 words, and if you have more to say, break it up into several pages of 200-250 words. This statement has confounded companies who had a lot to say about a subject and preferred to say it all on one page. Several established authorities have published studies of their audiences, both for Pay Per Click (PPC) landing pages, and for organic web pages. Marketing Experiments found that long copy outperformed short copy by 40.54%, and traffic to the page with longer copy produced an… [more]
5 Steps: Keep your site “fresh” with minimal effort
Keeping content up to date isn’t just a matter of being a good do-bee anymore. Beyond visitors staying engaged, the search engines want to know that you care about updating your content (and they’ll start sliding you down the rankings if you don’t). The problem is that sometimes, there’s just not much new stuff to promote! News might be a little slow, no events are coming up, and no new products are ready to be introduced. So how are you supposed to maintain that “new site smell” when there’s nothing new to add? Here’s a quick and dirty way to… [more]
Google wants to help your website serve its mobile visitors
No doubt, the buzz around mobile has increased nearly geometrically of late. With good reason: already, over half of all users access the Internet via a mobile device; and that will grow to 90% by 2015, according to IDC Research VP Karsten Weide. And don’t be misled that all that activity comes from pedestrians looking for an Italian restaurant or a mocha latte; your prospects are also killing travel waiting-time by searching on topics that are top-of-mind with them at the time …which may well include the problem your B2B offering solves. We’ve done our bit to keep this tsunami… [more]
Google’s “Panda” down-ranks sites for poor design/usability
Most of the various learned analyses of Google’s Panda search-algorithm update of last spring (and ongoing via numerous micro-updates) focused on its effect on so-called “content farms” …and on those legitimate sites that had the misfortune to be confused with such farms by the new algorithm, and thus were unceremoniously dropped many pages in Google’s results pages. So if your site was not a content farm – and didn’t resemble one – you probably breathed a sigh of relief and
Online videos “for dummies”: a getting-started guide
Continuing our series on online video – the most recent being this one – we realize that most of our clients aren’t General Motors, and won’t be creating videos with truly high production values anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean that the medium isn’t for them. Video can tell a story easier and quicker than a written page, and it helps to humanize your company. And now, video that accomplishes those things is within reach of nearly every firm. So what may be needed is
The whys and hows of using online video in business
We’ve discussed the video topic before, most recently in this post. We keep coming back to it, because it’s still the best tool you’re probably not using …and there’s just no good reason for it to stay that way. Our reminder came from running across a post by David Wells that’s really an interview he did of Steve Garfield …who, it turns out, wrote the book on the subject (“Get seen”). The interview enabled Steve to briefly cover
Boost your site performance for your users, not for Google
Well, it’s been 9 months already since we posted our heads-up about Google’s decision to take site performance (page load speed) into account in its search-results ranking algorithm. We felt an update was in order; and in casting about for recent information, came across a data-heavy post by Geoff Kenyon on the Daily SEO Blog. Which is good, because our heads-up post was based mainly on
Most companies have missed the content bus. This formula will get you back on.
Nowadays, I see would-be marketing gurus reading tons of blogs and websites about marketing (Thanks!). We’re also participating in conversations on other blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and whatever new platform shows up tomorrow. But we’re spending a lot of time doing all the reading, re-posting and researching, and not enough time putting this stuff into practice. We’ll post/tweet/b2b-blog the same articles with the same advice 12 times in a day, but are we using that advice, or merely regurgitating it? Bottom line: most corporate site content still stinks of the year 2005. Full disclosure: I’m there, too. The Social Media… [more]
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