Does your website have a timeline?

Whether your business has a few hundred employees or it’s just yourself running the show, one of the simplest features you can integrate within your website is a page dedicated to displaying the important milestones your business has achieved form inception to now.
A ‘Milestone/Achievements’ feature shows that you take pride in not just your service/product but your business as a brand as well as offer a new prospect a sense of confidence in dealing with you.

Is Google going to be the end for SEO?

Some of you might have noticed or seen (if you were chosen as part of the bucket test) that Google is testing SearchWiki – a web 2.0 approach to search which allows users to rate search results, add comments to each result as well as view other user comments. Based on your rating of results, you can affect the positioning of SERP which means an organic result position 2 can be changed to 7 or 8 or removed completely.

Best of all, you can even add your own results via the URL and then move it up/down which means a result which would appear on page 4 organically can now be made to appear on page 1.

Although, at the moment, changes you make will only appear on your computer, I can’t help but think the whole point of this excercise from Google’s perspective is something more ‘grand’. Perhaps, applying principles of semantic search to learn from user ratings and creating new algorithms that will govern the future direction of how results and rankings are displayed.

For now it means that if your website is well optimised for Google your position within the SERP will appear as is. Until the user changes it. In the future this might mean that no matter how well your site is optimised, if users don’t like it, you are history. For Google anway.

Silly job titles

Check out the results of a recent survey of 4000 UK adults carried out by jobs2view.com for the silliest job titles adverts (listed in order of most votes received):

Vision Clearance Executive – Window cleaner
Waste Removal Engineer – Rubbish collector
Knowledge Navigator – Teacher
Stock Replinishment Adviser – Shelf filler
Dispatch Services Facilitator – Postman

Nice.

Looking beyond the first page

According to a study done by iProspect, 49% of us change our search terms and/or search engine after not finding our desired result on the first page (for those interested, this compares with 40% in 2007, 42% in 2005 and just 28% in 2004). Only 8% of us actually bother going past the third page.

I’ve been an avid internet user for many years and yet guilty of the same. However, on a recent online shopping trip to purchase a logo creation software, I discovered that the product that met my specifications the closest and offered the best value for money sat quietly all the way back at page 4 of Google.

Further exploration of this discovery by Googling products/services I was familiar with revealed that especially within the small business services sector, not being on the first or second page didn’t indicate lack of relevance or even quality for that matter. It only meant that the websites on these back pages have simply not been optimised for search engines. If anything, it might even indicate that these companies have such a well established off line presence and customer base that they do not need to market online actively.

Yahoo dismisses Google search tech.

This has got to be a first- Noticed yahoo running a flash ad on its home page which went something like this: ‘LOST searching Google for Holiday recipes.. Find your perfect recipe through Yahoo with minimum fuss…’.

What’s interesting is not only the fact that Yahoo is marketing its search technology superior to Google’s, these ads seem to be popping up shortly after the Justice Commision in America killed the Yahoo-Google ad deal due to antritrust reasons.

Website traffic analysis

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click are useful in getting traffic to your door but an often overlooked but incredibly useful tool in getting to know your website visitor is with the use of a website analytical software.

Over the years, I have tried many of them and have been using onestat.com for sometime now for its ease of use and effecitve reporting features. Most of them are fairly easy to use once you have copied the code onto your website pages and it can give you some wonderful insight such as:

• Where are your visitors coming from (country, websites, links etc)
• keywords/phrases they are typing to find you
• If your business is listed in multiple online directories, then which ones are actually working
• And much more..

A good program can also tell you the ‘Click Path’ of the visitor right up until the conversion point (purchase made, contact form filled) which can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your website’s navigation.

For the small business owner, this is one of the most cost-effective tools that can impact the bottom line.

What makes a great logo?

Is it really about how well it represents your company? Or is it? Two words: Starbucks, Nike.

The design elements of the logo itself doesnt tell you anything about what the company does if the word ‘coffee’ wasn’t there, yet very impactful and memorable.

While we are on the subject of positive customer experiences..

PLEASE SMASH CUP DOWN REALLY HARD

Those are the words that I found printed on a coffee plate I was served in a cafe outside Windsor Castle, UK.

Whether it was intentionally designed as such to enhance the customer experience or simply to inject some humour, it certainly made my visit much more enjoyable.

Clever.

A Marketing lesson from F1

Anybody watched the race yesterday? If it wasn’t for the dramatic last lap action (for those not familiar- Lewis Hamilton needed to finish 5th or higher which he maintained throughout, lost a position on the last lap and then regained it on the last CORNER!). And its already being hailed as ‘an epic finale’, ‘classic race’ etc.

Makes me think about the importance of positive customer experiences in the marketplace, especially during the last leg of the transaction. The experience starts pretty much from when the customer interacts with your brand , whether its direct (phone call, face-to-face ) or indirect (advertising, word-of-mouth).  As a customer-centric company, our goal should be to meet and exceed expectations at each point of the interaction. The key here is to do that little something extra (unexpected) so the customer can walk away with a truly satisfied feeling.

“Brands are built on experiences, not advertising” - John Hayes, American Express CMO