Part 5 in James Gurd's website optimisation series
In Part Five of this SEO series, I'll show how to improve page titles and meta descriptions to increase traffic from natural search. This type of testing should be an integral part of any optimisation program and these two elements are often overlooked.
As many of you will know, there are two key elements that appear in every listing, regardless of whether or not you have optimised your webpages to display targeted content:
Page title
Meta description
Why is this important?
It's simple, the words that people see on search engines results pages (SERPs) influences their click decision. The more persuasive the copy and the closer it appeals to the needs of the searcher, the greater the propensity to click. Google rewards pages which have a higher relative click through rate since this is a positive relevance signal. Furthermore, the title…
A key mobile design trend in 2013
Mobile usage is only going one way. Up. Rapidly.
[caption id="attachment_9550" align="aligncenter" width="537" caption="UK mobile adoption exploding: 27 million regular users, 54% of all mobile users. Source: Comscore."][/caption]
But how good are the experiences we're building for customers? Designing experiences on mobile is challenging because of the form factor and because it's a relatively new design approach with the tools and technologies evolving fast. Brands also want to get to market fast.
Today's mobile designs often fail to differentiate brands
These challenges can lead to some "screen scrape" design approaches where every site looks similar, with little differentiation of brand or experience. These 4 retail sites show this:
Don't get be wrong, these sites show a lot of features of good…
A planned approach to make better use of video marketing
Video has now become a staple part of many business’ marketing toolkits, but there are still plenty out there who are yet to jump on the horse.
This guide is designed to help you get on that (still pretty young and frisky) horse and quickly. It is not an exhaustive guide instead we will point you to the resources you need to get your first video out there.
1. Work out how video will support your goals
Don't use video marketing because everybody else is. Instead, start with what are you trying to achieve as a business in 2012?
Your video marketing efforts should part of your marketing plan - an engagement tactic to support your goals. You should not be creating a video just because others are. Of course take a look at what your competitors are doing as well as…
Question: I wondered whether you might be able to point me in the direction of some info on web behaviour?
We've recently been looking at "drop off" rates for some of our online content and seeing if we can compare it with external sites to help gauge whether the behaviours we are seeing could be considered as "typical".
The metrics we've been looking at include time spent on a page (0-10, 10-20 seconds etc) and would like to compare to external websites such as BBC, YouTube, etc.
Do you know how it is possible to obtain this data, or any external websites who may have it?
We measure it, but have no external reference as to whether it is good, bad or indifferent.
Nicola
Smart Insights Expert Answer: Yours is a familiar problem for all analytics users. We hear "What does good like"? "How do we compare"? questions often. So, you need some context, otherwise the…
Facebook accounts for 52% of sharing on the web
New AddThis report for social sharing during 2011
AddThis, the social share bar tool used by more than 11m websites and 1.2Bn users, with their owners Clearspring, have followed the popularity of their 2010 report with a new 2011 update - see the info-graphic based report below.
The story is once again Facebook led, no surprise, comparing to the 2010 report you can see that Facebook is growing in its place as the default way people are sharing information.
2011 - 52% of AddThis shares are via Facebook
2010 - 44% of AddThis shares are via Facebook
2009 - 33% of AddThis shares are via Facebook
Twitter too is up 577% this year and accounts for 13.5% of sharing, based upon the AddThis Analytics. It was up 105% in 2010 over 2009, so the acceleration there is pretty big to say the least.
The mobile increase is what I…
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Yahoo mobile modes research
I found this research interesting since it set out to understand how users interact with devices on their mobile. We all know from our personal use of mobiles that, if we have a smartphone, we’ll prefer apps for some tasks and browsers for others. This research gives a nice clear statement on what these mobile tasks are:
(more…)…
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google GoMo site
We’ve seen a lot of interest in our posts on mobile marketing options and mobile adoption stats this year, so thought it would be useful to flag this new site to you.
If you’re reviewing your mobile strategy, this is worth reviewing, but be warned, the site is bizarrely designed as “a Flash horror show” so is light on in-depth technical information and marketing ideas.
However, there are useful features which you may find helpful. We think these are the most useful ones:
Test your current site feature
10 mobile best practices
Suppliers - not comprehensive
…
Web response time statistics summary
I was recently called by an email service provider following-up on a whitepaper I had downloaded. Nothing unusual there, it's a good B2B permission marketing practice and for high value consumer products or services too.
What stood out for me was that it was a full month after I had downloaded the document and they chastised me for not reading the paper when I said I hadn't had time to take a look. How about they followed-up sooner!
This got me thinking about when is the ideal time for a follow-up? Is immediate better or is this too "big-brother". Well I recalled some data on this from a while back and turned to my Google+ Email commentators circle who soon pointed me at the data I was thinking of from back in 2008. Thanks Brian Eisenberg and Riaz Kanani!
Here are the results... It's from a post on 5…
What is an average bounce rate
Question: I wondered whether you might be able to point me in the direction of some info on web behaviour?
We've recently been looking at “drop off” rates for some of our online content and seeing if we can compare it with external sites to help gauge whether the behaviours we are seeing could be considered as 'typical'.
The metrics we've been looking at include time spent on a page (0-10, 10-20 seconds etc) and would like to compare to external websites such as BBC, YouTube, etc.
Do you know how it is possible to obtain this data, or any external websites who may have it?
We measure it, but have no external reference as to whether it is good, bad or indifferent.
Nicola
July 2011 update
Google Analytics has just published a compilation of Average bounce rates - see the caveats later in my article about the dangers of comparing…
We're big fans of using the web for qualitative feedback using the many types of website visitor feedback software. These tools really enable you to find out what web users think and feel about your site and your brand online, while the web analytics are more about the how and when web users interact with your brand.
Around a year ago we did an interview with Kampyle where I asked Eran Savir, their co-founder about how their online customer feedback tool could be used for feedback. We've been using Kampyle since we launched Smart Insights and have found it really useful for feedback. We get around 30-40 pieces of feedback each week and average around 4 out of 5 which we're pleased with - thank you for telling us what you think. What we find most useful though are the occasional negative comment which really make us sit…
