Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

As we drafts our blog posts, many of us envision our captivated and loyal audience who hangs on each word we type like it is their lifeblood. I hate to break it to you but that is usually not the case. Most of your blog traffic, no matter the industry or purpose, is coming from search engines and/or they are first time visitors.

A survey done by Compendium says:

• Three quarters of B2Cs surveyed said over 80% of their traffic are first time visitors and
• 64% of B2Bs said that between 61 and 100 percent of visitors were first time visitors

Having this information is empowering and should actually help you put your content together so that you are marketing to these readers effectively.

The first thing I would recommend is seeing exactly what is happening with your site. Go into your website’s Analytics and if you haven’t already, set up a Blog Only filter so you can see your blog stats without the rest of your site. Once you have that filtered out, you can look to see exactly where your blog’s traffic is coming from. Take note of how many visitors are new versus returning. Then look at how many are coming from Search. From there you can see what terms people searched for to get to your blog.

Now that you have an idea of how many of your blog visitors are new and how they are getting to your site, you can start to optimize your blog for these new visitors.

1. Tell them who you are quickly – Since this reader hasn’t been there before, let them know right off the bat who you are and what you do. The most obvious place to do this is in the header but another great place for a little bit more of an explanation is in a sidebar.
2. Convert them – When a new visitor comes to your blog, know what you want them to do next and make it very clear to them. Whether you want them to subscribe to your blog, contact you, connect with you on a social network or download more information – make that piece very clear on every blog page. New visitors aren’t mind readers. Let them know the next steps they should take if they enjoyed your content.
3. Show them similar content – If this new visitor got here for this post’s content in particular, maybe they would like other content around the same topic? Think about adding Related Posts to the end of your blog entries. You can do this manually or find a variety of different plugins that could do this automatically for you.
4. Optimize for mobile browsers – Since we know more and more people are reaching your website from mobile devices, you want to make sure your blog is easy to read when visitors are on the go. Make sure you know how your blog looks on multiple different mobile platforms and if you are receiving a good amount of mobile traffic to your blog, you may want to consider a mobile theme.
5. Let them know you know who they are – I have some colleagues that have had great success with a greeting box when someone new comes to their site. One example is WP (WordPress) Greet Box plugin. This neat plugin makes a note of how the user got to your blog and has a custom greeting for them depending on how they got there. For example if someone came to your blog after clicking on a link on Twitter, they will see a message encouraging to Tweet your post and to follow you on Twitter.

Now that you know how many of your blog visitors are new, you can really start focusing on making them subscribers, connections and leads! Good luck and let us know any tricks you have for connecting with new visitors too! We love to hear them!

Stunning statistic, right? I thought so and you should too. Here are some additional mobile stats if you need the extra nudge:

• 95% of smartphone users have searched for local information
• 61% of users call a business after searching; 59% visit the location
• 90% of these people act within 24 hours
  (source: Google “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users,” 2011)

Ok, now that we all see how important this is – let’s talk about how to make sure that your mobile website is optimized for local search.

1. Your site should redirect mobile viewers to the mobile version of your site seamlessly.
2. Make sure you provide your address and make sure it’s easy to find on the site.
3. Have more than one location? Provide a store locator.
4. Provide directions or include a map. Or both.
5. Use GPS features if possible.

Because local is so important make sure you’ve set up your Google Places profile as thoroughly as possible and any other local listings that are available to you. One thing to mention is that you should try to keep your name, address, and phone number the same across all listings if possible. This just makes for consistency across the web and helps to not confuse search engines as to who you are.

Oh, and don’t forget to make sure you have your phone number on your mobile site. Have it set up as “click-to-call” for, you know, that 61% that will call.

Flickr Photo Credit: Ed Yourdon

We talked a lot about mobile last year and we’re probably going to talk about it even more this year. Hopefully you’re all okay with that and hopefully you took our advice and reviewed the mobile visitors on your website and maybe even considered using a mobile site. Did you see what Google Analytics is doing with mobile analytics now? They are showing you the actual device that your site visitors used to browse your site.

Why does this matter?

There are so many devices that use different screen sizes and offer different browsing experiences. It’s a lot to keep up with! The more you understand about the types of devices people are using to visit your site, the better you can improve your mobile site to give them a good user experience. Of course there is always responsive design, which allows you to cater your website to all mobile and tablet devices. However, you may still want to give your mobile visitors a unique mobile experience when interacting with your business website. So, if you do have a mobile site, you can use the information in Google Analytics to customize their interaction. Not only will the device type help you understand how they are browsing but it also gives you some insight as to who is browsing. For example, if you have a higher number of Blackberry visits than iPhone visits, what can you learn about the people browsing your site?

Other cool mobile reporting

Not only can you see the device, you can see who their service providers are and “Mobile Input Selector” tells you if they are using a touchscreen, a click wheel, or another method to select information using their mobile device. You can also see top screen resolutions in a simple report format.

It can be intimidating to try to accommodate so many different resolutions and device types but, there are lots of tools to help you see how your website looks on different devices.

(I think) This is the third year in a row dubbed as “the year of mobile” so you should all be ready for this by now. I know I am interested to see what happens in the mobile world this year – how voice search changes mobile browsing and how that will affect mobile advertising.

I am always intrigued to learn new and creative ways that businesses/brands are using mobile marketing. Is it to nerdy to say that I’m excited to see what mobile will bring to us this year? Oh well, it’s true, bring it on 2012!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

I am sure that somewhere in Santa’s workshop there is a Testing Committee that spends all day testing the toys to make sure they look good and work the way they are supposed to. Testing is an important part of creating toys; I know those elves want to make sure the kids are happy on Christmas morning and not crying over broken toys.

Testing is also an important part of the website business. You want to make sure your website looks good and works too! But what about your mobile site? We talked a lot about mobile this year and encouraged you to check out what your website looked like on a mobile device. Did you?

If you were on the Testing Committee for mobile sites this is what you would test:

1. How does it look? If it doesn’t fit within the tiny screen very well or different elements are overlapping each other, send it back to the work shop!
2. The speed. Recently graduated from Google Labs, Google offers Page Speed testing for mobile.  Simply put the URL into the form field, click “Analyze,” and  make sure the “Mobile” option is selected in the right hand corner. The overview will give you a score out of 100. Did you get an F? Are there any high priority items to fix?
3. Is it broke? At Hall, we like to test the validity of site code using the W3C code standards. Now there are W3C standards for mobile so we can check out the code using that tool.  Same as Google Page Speed you just need to put the URL into the form field and click “Check.” Again, you get a score kicked back out of 100%. How’d you do this time? Similar to the Page Speed Test, they try to prioritize the edits you need to make to your mobile site in order to have it comply with mobile standards. If you’re still seeing critical errors, you might need to send it back to the work shop.
4. How does it look on different devices? Does it look good on some devices and poorly in others? Depending on your industry you might want to ask other people you work with to test it on their devices and report back. If your industry requires more extensive, ongoing testing you can purchase different devices for testing or (probably a cheaper option) download a device emulator. We like MITE (Mobile Internet Testing Environment) a lot because it has a huge device library. Using MITE, you also get a grade based on Content, Performance, and W3C best practices; plus you get a visual of what your site looks like in a particular device. But there are also other device emulators that you can download  and even some good Firefox add ons that we have found helpful.

Your mobile site is more important now than it has ever been. By now you should have a clear idea of how much traffic your site is getting from mobile browsers and how that is growing over time as well as how to review your site’s performance. Don’t overlook testing your mobile site; just like the elves you want to make sure that it looks good and works properly for everyone that uses it.

Photo Credit: Elf Yourself by JibJab & Office Max

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!