In a nutshell the article talks about designing user flows rather than designing page-by-page. A user flow is the path or funnel a user takes from the initial acquisition to a point of conversion. A conversion may be signing up for a newsletter, downloading an e-book, or making a purchase. To start designing user flows it’s important to define both the user and business objectives. From there you can start building flows in order to reach both parties goals.

Two examples of user flows for e-commerce and subscription websites. (Photo courtesy of Smashing Magazine)

The idea of designing your site based on user flows may not seem revolutionary; in fact a lot of us already do this to some degree or another. What I did find interesting about the article was the concept of stacking flows to create a more cohesive user experience life cycle. Stacking funnels helps you to think beyond the initial conversion and design for the ultimate conversion (i.e. a purchase). Essentially all this talk about stacking flows is basically the same as taking your nurture sequence and stacking it on top of the initial conversion funnel, whether that is an email sign up or joining a free webinar. A nurture sequence is what happens after the initial customer acquisition. It is the path you take the user on to nurture them back on to your website and ultimately to your shopping cart.

Stacking funnels creates a cohesive user experience life cycle. (Photo courtesy of Smashing Magazine)

Combining these two elements together gives you a crystal clear blueprint that you can work backwards from and design a more effective and enjoyable experience for your user.

Read more about designing user flows at Smashing Magazine. 

Google's pile of money is built upon the solid foundation of an even larger pile of money. And they want to maximize their ROI, just like we do.

It costs Google to be Google.

To crawl and index everything in the world is a massive undertaking, with very real costs attached to it. Google’s latest updates are all about its money. Crawling and indexing the internet is a very real cost and since the beginning of 2011, wasteful websites have been actively punished in the name of “quality” and to save resources.

What should I do?

This is a great time to optimize your website! Ultimately, it makes for a better experience, a more Google-friendly site, and a better Internet. Inspired largely by the SEOmoz Mozinar, here are 5 ways to tune your website to work seamlessly with the modern Google:

✓ Make leaner web sites that load faster

Make pages unique – don’t repeat the same thing over and over. Syndicated content is still a great way to bolster your website, but make sure it doesn’t outweigh your uniquely valuable content. Using Google’s ownPage Speed Chrome Extension or Page Speed Online Analyzer is a great way to get actionable suggestions, straight from Google.

✓ Consolidate multiple domains

Differentiate them enough that they clearly stand on their own, or roll them back into your main site. Make one fantastic site instead of a bunch of alright ones!

✓ Create Unique Value

You still can’t beat having something worth looking at – and sharing. Amazon, for example, add volumes of value in the form of reviews (both their own and customer reviews), interviews, videos, lists, wish lists, and more.

✓ Invest in Quality

Buy high quality content and get it linked. High quality is always better. It’s worth it. 1 moment of excellence is worth hundreds of mediocrity.

✓ Analyze and Optimize Everything

Use Web Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Heatmaps, and Professional SEO Tools to analyze your website, and find where you can improve. And to actively test the improvements you make – so you can be certain that changes you make are the right ones. This will allow you eo ensure that things work exactly as they should – at every step of your website.

The bigger you make the pie, the bigger your piece gets...

Give Google a Positive ROI and You’ll Be Rewarded

Google’s budget is very real. If you give them high return for their resources, then you can expect them to invest more in you. Make your web presence optimal, help contribute to making a more Google friendly Internet, and Google will be more friendly towards you.

You may have heard about serious fluctuations in Google’s rankings lately. Some sites are getting downright hammered. Some are getting boosted. We know what’s going on, and we can help you through it.

What’s going on is a permanent change to Google, and the Internet in General.

Getting traffic online used to be all about something called “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization.” At its core, it was only really driven by two things: The actual worded content that appeared on your site, and links back to your website from other sites.

This worked well enough until people realized that it was quite mathematical, which meant it was vulnerable to cheating. It is really easy to crank out reams of keyword-targeted content, links from other websites, and even other keyword targeted websites themselves with their own links, and so forth. And the more money you made from doing it, the faster and cheaper it is to build even more. And so if you dig deep enough into the web presence of many high-ranked sites, you’d find an enormous pile of pretty ugly stuff: spammed links from peoples’ blogs, websites that consist solely of ripped-off content from other sites, and an incredible amount of writing that exists merely to repeat words. So it is with very good reason that content and links aren’t what they used to be. Things will never be the same again ever.  This is a good thing.

No successful online presence can be an island.

The old way was to create content targeted to keywords, and go out and find relevant links from sites. Most popular methods were ones that involved no human interaction: directories, link exchanges, eventually blog comments, etc. But businesses are supposed to engage their marketplace, not simulate it.

1. Quality is key. You can’t get by anymore by simply cranking out content for the sake of hitting keywords. It has to be useful and worthy of inclusion in Google’s index and to its users.

“What’s quality?”

• A well designed, user-friendly website with engaging and fresh content that serves a purpose for people who visit it.
• Uniqueness and/or superiority: Do something new and useful that nobody else does or do something familiar absolutely better than everybody else. Always keep the user in mind.
• Make what you do as accessible as possible. This one’s the most immediately actionable for most website. While video, PDF, and other formats might not themselves be high-quality, they are now being seen as quality signals. The idea is that if you’ve taken the time to present your information in multiple formats, you’ve probably created something you want people to see – not just search engines.

In short, a page that fulfills the need of the searcher is a high-quality page.

2. Conversions are key. A conversion occurs when a desired criteria is fulfilled (ie time on a page, or multiple page views on a site), or a user performs a specific action (purchase, newsletter signup, etc).  Conversions are a clear signal of quality because they mean that your site fulfills its visitors’ needs. A site with high conversion rates is clearly fulfilling a purpose for its audience. In other words, the site is useful to people in the way that it’s supposed to be.

3. Participation is key. Participation in the social sphere is now mandatory for many businesses. You might choose not to. But right now there is a competitor actively engaging your market. They will steal it from you if you sit back. This is the way that Google will be able to separate the true experts from the pretenders. What matters now is not knowing how the Internet works, but deserving a top spot in the market. You need to prove that you’re worthwhile.

4. Branding is key. Claim your brand online – or hire a company to secure and optimize your online branding. Get yourself listed in the Better Business Bureau. Do everything that it takes to prove that yours is a legitimate company dedicated to providing superior service to a specific market. Be a real branded company – not just a mass of words targeting a niche.

Belong in your Marketplace

As painful as it may seem, this is about separating people who are passionate and well-informed from those who are simply set up to exploit a niche. Make sure you provide value and find a way to let your audience let people know.

Please feel free to ask any questions or bring us any comments or concerns you might have.

Websites around the are falling victim to Google’s new “Panda” update. It’s designed to weed out so-called “low quality” websites, but in reality it’s also taken a lot of others down with it.

Google is now claiming to favor high quality content that gives people what they want – or find unexpectedly worthwhile. And penalize sites that don’t. Hopefully this won’t require too much adjustment.

Give the people what they want. Target searcher needs instead of search engines.

Making people stay is good. Making people share something is great. Making people convert is excellent.

What Industry Leaders are Saying About Panda

In this video, SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin talks about SEOmoz’s findings on how Panda has changed SEO – and a quick overview of what the “new SEO” now looks like.

Here’s some of Rand’s key points, with some additions from us:

Quality is Key.

Build your pages for people, not for search engines.

Google has done lots of user testing and also has a massive amount of user metrics. They now feel they have everything they need to predict whether people will like your site, and to evaluate whether or not they actually do.

Content should be easy-to-read and well presented. Design needs to focus on the user.

“Good quality content” that is written needs to be replaced with purposeful content.

Conversion rates measure quality.

A conversion occurs when a visitor does something that you specifically want them to do. Though conversion rates are more often associated with purchases, downloads, subcriptions, or contact, they can also be simply assigned to key pages, or page views.

A high conversion rate is a great measure of the new standard of quality – whether or not you’re offering what people want.

When lots of people arrive at your site via a keyword and proceed to completing a converting, you probably had what they were looking for when they searched. That’s quality as defined by the user.

Social signals indicate quality.

This one is a bit tougher – how can “social signals” be an on-site quality signal? Apparently, content that people will want to share has certain characteristics to it as well. In addition, social signals are the new big ranking signal.

So, if you’re going to create content for a keyword – create sharable content and get it shared.

Try to make it content that people would share in your niche (check out what’s being shared for some ideas) and make it easy to share from your site.

Get it shared to get rank – get it into the hands of influencers, and find ways to encourage people to share.

Add the kind of content people like and the formats they like: Video, PDF’s, embedded presentations, and they’ll be more likely to share – and to stick around and read themselves.

How to avoid low-quality content

Get rid of duplicate content, whether on-site or from other sites. Avoid changing a couple words and re-using things. Avoid pages that merely define a keyword. Avoid more outsourcing to third-world content writers just to keyword stuff.

Stay tuned for more Panda-specific updates. If you have any questions or comments, please add them below.

IIMA Fusion 2011 brought internet marketing luminaries to Vancouver BC.

With IIMA Fusion 2011 came some of the most influential people in search engine, social media, and online marketing strategy – and their expertise – who presented for a power-packed day of seminars and workshops on internet marketing strategy and execution, including search marketing, conversion optimization, user engagement, analytics, and e-commerce. Path Marketing CEO James Carter emceed the event and introduced each speaker – all of whose time and insight was very much appreciated.

Fusion featured helpful information for newcomers and veterans alike.

Seminars and workshops were well-reviewed and well-attended. Highights among those attended by this author included:

• Keynote speaker Rand Fishkin – CEO SEOmoz and co-author of The Art of SEO, who presented on how SEOmoz built itself into a successful company with industry-standard SEO software, and featured current opportunities. These include vertical search (dominating multiple search engine types, such as video, discussions, maps, and even multiple engines themselves) and the abundance of ranking factors, which represent significant opportunity to get indexed and ranked.
• Stephan Spencer, founder of NetConcepts and fellow author of The Art of SEO, who presented on “The Social Media Underground“. Among his key insights were just how important it is to make sure that your content winds up in front of the right eyes – getting it in front of influential people will increase your outreach immensely. In addition, it’s important to reciprocate on help you get. “Social Media” is just that.
• Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media and Chris Goward of Wider Funnel Marketing conducting a workshop on landing page optimization where they evaluated sites, talked about the best use of the most valuable page “real estate” (the top right), showed how simple landing pages and calls to action usually convert better than more complex ones, and recommended against video overuse on landing pages.

Thanks again to everyone who presented! We’re looking forward very much to IIMA Fusion 2012!

You’ve been reviewed online. It’s bad. You know people will read it because you have. To make it worse, who knows who wrote the review? A genuine disgruntled customer? An unscrupulous competitor? An internet troll? Who is this person trashing your reputation and putting your livelihood at risk?

It's never a good feeling.

Deal with it.

This doesn’t mean “find the serenity to accept it.” It means you should deal with so it’s not harming your business anymore. Make the bad thing go away.

If you have suspicions of foul play – that the review is a planted hit piece – then by all means follow up with a little detective work. But put a fire out before you move on to investigating what caused it. How you should respond to bad reviews, especially intially, should follow a specific formula that first minimizes damage, and ultimately gets rid of the review entirely – or the nearest thing to it.

Rid yourself of a bad review and you might look good in the process.

The right approach will help your business recover as quickly as possible and prevent any further damage. You might even come out looking better ever. A bad review offers the chance to show how well you deal with customer dissatisfaction.

To fix a bad review as quickly as possible follow these 4 R’s:

1. Relax

Don’t be a hothead. Don’t flail. You will probably make things worse. Take a deep breath and respond like the professional and dedicated person you are.

Take a moment.

Remember: people post negative content online for all kinds of reasons, including just to get a rise out of you. It’s what they call “trolling.”

Don’t get hooked! Never forget that your response will probably be just as visible as the review. Stay clear headed and follow the the next three R’s to rid yourself of the blemish on your online reputation.

2. Respond

Most review sites let businesses to respond to bad reviews. This is your chance to show how you respond to complaints and criticism. This is also your chance to get your word in. A bad review with a great response can actually be an asset – it’s proof that if things ever go amiss, you’ll still respond with excellence. You might even get a link and some web traffic out of it.

Offer to make things right and encourage the customer to contact you. Whether or not they do, anyone who sees the review also sees your response. And you’ll have had the last word.

Respond professionally and you'll look good.

Get someone to stick up for you.

A very potent response could come from a satisfied customer – someone who’ll defend you as a customer who found themselves in a similar situation and was looked after or a customer whose experience was absolutely nothing like the bad experience described in the review.

Whether or not you’re able to respond to the review, you should always make efforts to make things right with the customer. If handled properly they might even turn into an equally vocal supporter.

3. Remove

Some review sites also let businesses request removal of reviews if they feel they’ve been treated unfairly. Most don’t, but some do. It’s worth your while to find out about the review site’s policy.

See if they'll take it down. It's worth a shot.

4. Replace

This is the last step for a reason. It’s by far the most labor intensive and is best used in situations where you either weren’t able to respond to the review, or you really don’t want it read by or influencing other people. To prevent this from happening, you’ll replace the review with other content: You’ll drown it out on the review site itself and drive it down in the search engines.

Replace the bad review on the site

Get satisfied customers to write positive reviews on the same sites. Call in some favors. Make it easy for them and make it work their time. It’s considered poor form to solicit good reviews or to offer incentives, so don’t get caught doing it. Target your best customers and reward their kindness. Hire a firm to find review sources. Drown out the bad review with good ones.

Target the site with positive reviews.

Keep this in mind, though: many review sites flag reviews based on a variety of ‘suspicious’ criteria – one of which can be too many of the same kind all at once. So  don’t go too crazy with it. And do not make the mistake of hiring obvious shills. That’s much worse.

A bad review carries less far weight if it’s surrounded by good ones, so find a way to add them – carefully.

Replace the bad review site in the rankings

Drive it down in the rankings by taking up space above it. This is called “SEO for reputation mangement.” If you push it off the front page for the relevant keywords, you’ve pretty much taken care of things.

Boost the content you want people to see.

How?

• Get good reviews on other review sites, and help them rank.
  Help positive reviews appear on other review sites. Bolster those reviews, and the sites they appear, on in the rankings: Blog about them, bookmark them, and build links to them. Move positive reviews up to push the negative reviews down.
• Add your own content on your site and others, and help them rank.
  If they rank on the first page for your business name, start creating more presence online. For example:
  -Upload different forms of content: PDF’s, PowerPoint Presentations, Videos, to sharing sites such as YouTube and SlideShare. Videos are prime candidate for re-use across many sites.
  -Google Maps/Local/Places/Whatever. Many search terms now return maps listings first. Build a great places page and get it into the first page Maps results.
  -Social Media: Facebook & Twitter.  One advantage to social media pages are that they tend to rank well for brand names. Create yours and build some presence on them. They also integrate very wel with other sites, such as…
  -Free websites & outreach blogs about your business and its relevant keywords. Create free site accounts and write quality posts that link to other accounts.
  -Integrate and embed these accounts into each other to get more benefit

Tread lightly – don’t be foolish and get caught planting reviews or pretending to be other people. But it’s fine – beneficial, even – for a business to have lots of presence online. Build quality content and links to it to replace the bad review in the search engines.

This can all be Taken Care of

Bad revies are a headache to any business owner – and when they happen online they happen in front of everyone. But they are manageable.

The 4 R’s are an effective solution to bad reviews. A good response can turn a negative review into a positive. And strategically targeted content and SEO can make bad reviews disappear from view.

Consider hiring internet marketing professionals to ensure it’s done right.

A good internet marketing firm can provide immediate solutions to bad reviews and a strong positive start to help nullify them – then provide the tools and knowhow for a business to completely own and maintain its brand online.

Questions?

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below. We’d love to hear from you.

I wish I’d written this one, but alas Avinash Kaushik the Google Analytics Pioneer has done a pretty sweet job of covering this.

Check out Avinash’s Post With Detailed Screen shots & Learn How to Set-up Google Analytics Click-to-Call
A Quick Video on Click-to-Call:

Google’s Official Video on Call Metrics (still only available in US):

We have had several customers use Hoovers’ data service integrates directly with Salesforce.com to give sales & marketing teams the ability to improve data hygiene, quickly access more complete picture of the key stakeholders in a major account and develop prospecting lists.

This is good news for small business clients that don’t have a lot of time to dive in there every month, and can’t justify a budget for somebody else to roll-up their sleeves every month.

In simple terms, this means that if you set this up properly on a poorly optimized account and come back in a month, your overall conversion rate should be higher.

You will find the settings in the “Ad Delivery” options in AdWords, check out Google’s official blog post on ad rotation for conversion rate.

See for yourself. The monkey does a good job of illustrating the problem!