Get More from Search - Trends in Search & Social Media

Our attention spans are shorter these days. With the immediate answers available from search engines, we’ve come to expect more from the websites we visit. As such, we’re all guilty of nibbling on site after site, looking for the right combination of design, content and product that will stop us in our tracks and engage our busy minds.

Your website visitors follow this same pattern. If, for instance, your website takes too long to load, they’ll just continue onto another site. Your goal as a website owner is to slow visitors down, giving them time to absorb your message and let your product or service make a lasting impression. So how do you capture their attention without frustrating them?

Simple is better. If you give people too many choices they will become overwhelmed and will go to a site that will make it easier for them to choose. Even if your company prides itself on a plethora of products and services, your bottom line will be better served by putting the spotlight on a few timely, best-selling products and guiding visitors to learn more about those products. A little bit of information can go a long way. Don’t overwhelm users with the details. Instead, focus on the information that is important to them – often the key benefits and purchase-critical information (shipping, privacy, guarantees, customer service, etc.). If you provide them with too much information it will confuse them instead of clarifying the offering.

Relevant content is great, but too much or the wrong content is great at driving people away. You’re the expert in your field, but don’t expect your visitors to read protracted discourses on your company’s virtues. Those are better left for business plans, not for websites. Remember the simple is better philosophy and always be relevant. Strive for engaging, succinct editorial that invites an action. Try call-outs in the sidebars with various call to action items to cater to various personalities – make sure that your visitors can get to know and get in touch with your company in the method they’re most comfortable with.

Limit distractions. There’s always the potential that an engaged visitor one second will become another site’s visitor or customer the next. Incorporating third-party ads can be a great income generator, but they can also invite site hopping. Go for ad serving technologies where you can control the ad content and disable competitive messaging whenever possible. Your goal is to keep visitors on your site as long as possible because the longer they stay; the more likely they are to purchase a product or service.

Remove the stumbling blocks. Leaving the prospect with the potential for too many decisions will send a 90% closed sale into a missed opportunity. Once a visitor turns into a prospect, you’ve got to make absolutely certain that they have all the decision making pieces in full view (i.e. price) or within one pop-up window away of “Buy now” or “Contact us.”  Abandonment is often due to not enough of the right information and that’s just an unnecessary faux pas.   

Design for easy navigation. Keep your page design fairly consistent to minimize confusion. Site visitors look for critical information in the top menu of a website – so make sure the most important pages and action items are always visible.

Not driving visitors away from your site means slowing them down long enough to understand your message and learn why they should buy your product or service. To do this, incorporate these principles:  keep it simple, relevant, non-distracting, decision-making friendly and easily navigable. By doing this, you’ll convert visitors who really want to learn and enter into a purchase. The people who are just nibbling aren’t ready to convert – but your site will be memorable and who knows, they just might come back when they’re ready to stay.

Online video is the rising star in the advertising community. Why then do so many large companies continue to advertise with display ads? According to data from TNS Media Intelligence Vonage, AT&T and Dell spent a combined $489 million on display ads in 2006. Display ads hold 21% of the market share with US online advertisers while online video only holds 8% of the market share. That places display ads with triple the amount of market share over online video. This doesn’t mean that marketers are dissing online video, however. While advertising spending for display ads will remain flat over the next few years, online video will steadily increase until by 2011 they will have 17% of the market share for online advertisers.

Companies are finding that the more diversified you make your advertising the more effective your campaign will be. A study was released in December 2006 by comScore Networks that determined that if companies utilize both search and display advertising their campaign will be more engaging and effective than companies that use a single type of advertising campaign. Per the study, online users who were exposed to both display and search advertising increased their page views compared to competing sites by 68% and increased their time on the sites by 66%. Among those exposed also increased their purchases of the advertisers products and services by 244% online and 89% offline when compared to online users with similar behavior who didn’t view the ads.

Diversifying your marketing campaigns take planning, but an engaging multimedia campaign will pay you back with better ROI and make you look like the company rock star. All advertising is important; you just have to research what truly works best for your company and utilize the outlets that best connect with and influence your future customers.

How did you develop the information at your website? Did you use offline material or spin off content from press releases, news items or your internal communications? Then, did you layer on some graphics, maybe a little Flash animation to jazz it up some programming and think that your audience would get the message?

In actuality, your website may be failing to communicate the message you really intend to offer to your visitors. You need to open a dialog to effectively communicate – and you can start by thinking of your visitors as an audience that gives feedback, instead of just customers with credit cards in hand. Doing so can create a more enjoyable user experience, and will keep them at your site longer, engaged with your brand. This in turn creates the end goal you desire: more sales from a more loyal customer base.

It begs the question, “how do I go about creating an interesting website that will engage my precious site visitors, turn them into an audience and then into customers?” very successful method is to create a website that blends information, entertainment and community.

While the written word is the foundation for your website, it is also necessary for search engine optimization and it engages the reader types among your audience. Yet,  some Web 2.0 tools are within reach for most companies and offer so much benefit for the investment.

One tool that can help do that is web video. Video has a lot going for it, providing a platform to showcase your products, employees, customers or affiliated events in a rich media experience that is becoming commonplace. Video presentations need to have enough value to them that people want to share them with others and both the presentations and content must create a memorable experience that entertains the individual.

Video is not the place to lay on the sales pitch – your audience is looking to be entertained, not hit over the head with a self-serving show. Instead, create short videos that work together in creating a subtle brand campaign – engaging enough to keep their interest – and fresh enough to keep them coming back to find out what happens next. The underlying theme is your product, but the consumer is being entertained in the process. Buy-ready consumers are more likely to remember brands that entertained them.

Look to the Internet for other successful campaigns, Video sharing sites (i.e. www.youtube.com) and Web advertising awards (i.e. www.webbyawards.com) are a great place to start for what’s viral and what’s got the attention of consumers and brand marketers alike.

To improve your website, start the thought process from scratch – how can you best communicate with your online audience? Web users form an opinion about your company within seconds of reaching a website. Capture them with fresh content and keep them coming back with engagement tools like video. Stop talking (about your company). Instead, start communicating.

How do you create ongoing buzz about your company and speak directly to your buyers? The answer is press releases. The online environment provides an ideal canvas for distributing the news that your customers and prospects need to know about you.  And you don’t necessarily need a PR agency to write or distribute them for you. Online distribution outlets such as PRWeb, allow any size business to create and maintain an active press release campaign with little cost. Online press releases can give you more exposure with little cost and can drive quality traffic to your site. As a communication strategy, it is important to distribute releases on a regular basis to help keep your company in the front view of your consumers.

Random content won’t do though: you’ll need to set down some guidelines for your campaign. These include what you are going to include in your press releases, how you are going to create brand awareness and how you are going to get and maintain quality exposure for your company. Online press releases aren’t a license to be self-serving in your message; the content needs to be news-worthy first and foremost.  Focus on the customer, write about the benefits they’ll receive because of your new product development or how your latest partnership will yield them a better/faster/cheaper experience. PRWeb’s guidelines provide an excellent mental checklist as you develop copy. David Meerman Scott’s “New Rules of PR”  ebook is a must-read for anyone delving into the online press distribution space. You’ll understand how to write to your audience, what outlets to use and how to strategize a release schedule for consistent exposure. 

Some of the items you need to include in your press releases are the same things you need to include on your website, which include links and keywords. When you are constructing your campaign your goal is to create in-bound links to your site. You manage this through creating a press release that is rich in keywords that relate to your site, but you want to be careful to not over saturate your press release. Incorporating a good balance of two to three keywords is optimal, with a primary keyword and two secondary keywords. It is essential to research your keyword selections to make sure your keywords are geared toward your target audience and subject matter.

Brand awareness is important when working on your press release. You can optimize your press releases by utilizing media portals such as PRWeb and Internet News Bureau. Both websites will help you syndicate your press release to thousands of news outlets. It is imperative to include back links to a relevant landing page as it will provide valuable traffic to your site. 

As always, when creating any type of content for your site, whether it is press releases, blogs, articles or general product information, it is important to maintain a consistent voice and strategy in order to maximize the potential for long-term exposure for your business. If you provide great content with optimization you should be able to yield good results for your press release campaign.

Market research in regards to search is on the rise and it is more in-depth than keyword research. Companies are beginning to use market research and analytics to more thoroughly understand their customers’ search and browsing intent.  Businesses are integrating the findings into their Web design strategy to create a more focused environment for a site visitor’s behavior, often focusing on personalization to deliver a better overall experience.

Many companies focus on keyword research instead of market research. They believe the hype that has been generated by the large search engines in an effort to increase their advertising sales that all websites need to do is focus on their keyword research and they will succeed. Unfortunately, many companies do not understand that to fully understand your keyword research they need to understand market research. To be able to fully comprehend the desires of your target market and generate keywords that will spark their interest, companies need to understand their market which means they need to research not just the keywords that will work but the market as a whole. Companies need to remember that for all the advances in search, searches are conducted by humans and humans are complex individuals.

In the future, the focus will be on finding out what the consumer wants, understanding their mindset and figuring out how they will search for what they want. If sites are able to provide the content and information they are looking for, then they will be able to match their product mix to the consumer’s personal choices. This will be able to be analyzed through the use of statistics such as time-on-site, page views, repeat visits, click-through rates, etc. Companies also have the option of utilizing site search statistical software to help improve your analytical research. If the companies are able to attract their target consumer then they will also attract the attention of search engines.

Search optimization is in a state of transformation at the corporate level, which will change the way that consumers and companies view search and therefore your site. If anything has changed, it is that the bar has been set higher for Search Engine Optimization.

These days, when the 40 and below crowd think about newspapers, they think of an older, leisurely mentality that no longer exists.  Newspapers have been tagged with an image that is antiquated and somewhat irrelevant. Something had to be done. Rather than become handicapped by this image, newspapers across the United States have decided to improve the view that people have of them. They didn’t do anything flashy or ostentatious and they didn’t eliminate the traditional newspaper. Instead, they provided their content online for a busy community to peruse at their leisure.

Newspapers decided that instead of forcing their consumer to go to the store and buy their product that they would offer it free online. Then you have to ask yourself, how do they make their money if people aren’t buying the newspaper they can get for free? Advertising. This same philosophy works for them online. Instead of selling print ads in their newspaper, they sell online ads on their website.

And their audience is responding – both in readership and in online purchases.

Another aspect that newspapers are tapping into is the blog market. Traffic for newspaper blogs for the top 10 online newspapers grew 210% from December 2005 through December 2006. If newspapers can get consumers to visit their blogs then they are likely to view the articles provided online. With the increase in traffic, newspapers have the opportunity to increase their advertising exposure and therefore are able to improve their advertising sales.

 

 

 

 

In a recent study by the Newspapers Association of America (NAA), it found that 82% of the people who visit newspaper sites on a daily basis are more likely to make purchases online. This study will help newspapers leverage their advertising campaign to corporations and enable them to increase their advertising business. To find out more information about online newspaper growth, you can visit www.digitaledge.org, the NAA’s digital-media analysis website and www.emarketer.com, a streamlined, e-business research solution.