So as not to miss out, this year we've made a few of our own.
When it comes to digital or online marketing, and in fact business in general, predictions are often stated almost as fact - although few are backed up by any evidence, nor are they given any context for when, where or for whom they are most likely to apply. We prefer to make recommendations rather than predictions, and base them on what we actually see happening, statistics (nothing like hard evidence!) and our 15 years experience in the web business.
Given most of our customers are small-medium service and location based businesses here in Auckland, our predictions are skewed to be more relevant to these. So they won't apply to everyone, everywhere – but here they are.
There is no denying that your audience is now using mobile devices to access the internet.
However, mobile doesn’t just mean smart phones. Don't sucked into getting a single solution for smart phones without thinking about about your whole audience and all the devices they're using. Look at what they are doing, when and where are they doing it.
Over the last year or so we've seen sites clearly designed for smartphones. On which they probably look very nice, but fail on other factors including use on those old school devices – desktop PCs, and of more concern – SEO. (Conversely we're also seeing the rise of video and large image page backgrounds which may not be so good for mobile).
From our Google analytics statistics, we can see that for those clients that target consumers then the use of smartphones is definitely a factor. But for B2B customers, the percentage of visitors averages around 10% (although this has increased over the last 12 months).
The highest use of mobile devices (tablet and smartphones) for any of our client's websites is 36%. And although this client has a responsive site, visitors are still more likely to make a purchase using a desktop device. And it means that 64% are using desktop devices.
Yes – go mobile. But don't take the headlines that mobile use is overtaking desktop use at face value – it's more complex than this.
One prediction said “business are playing catchup in mobile marketing”. I'd agree with this – but just adding 'mobile friendly' to your wish list is only the start. What we see emerging is the trend for multiple device use – in other words, people haven't necessarily replaced PC's with mobile's yet - they are adding mobile devices into the mix (although we suspect the younger the user, the more likely it is that it is their only device).
Once you have moved to a site that is responsive to the needs of different devices, you need to look at all devices and experiences in a more holistic manner. Are they doing something different when on a mobile device? Looking for something different? What experience do we need to create on a mobile vs desktop? What do we need to do differently? How do we utilise location information as part of this ?
And don't ignore desktop PCs and laptops.
The Takeaway: If you haven't got a mobile friendly site, plan to do it in 2015. Go responsive rather than a seperate mobile site first, unless you have a good reason to do so. Then use your site analytics to start customising content and experience for different audiences as required.
Content is not king – it's the grand, all powerful high emperor.
People have become numb to infographics, funny cat photo's and spun articles at a time when content is even more important than ever – especially for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Create content relevant to your business that informs, guides and yes occasionally even entertains. Do it as often as you can in response to questions, new products and industry news.
Not sure what to say? You'd be surprised just how much information is right there at your fingertips in terms of the knowledge you and your staff have that your target audience would love access to.
Consideration of content length will also become more important. While short forms (tweets and vine length video) containing short messages are on the increase, longer blog posts and articles are more likely to be shared and are more valuable for SEO. So start thinking about 2000 word blog posts like this one ;)
To get better return on this effort, leverage and diversify to appeal to different tastes and different ways of getting content out there, particularly via the social networks. Convert text into slides, video and images. And content can also be in the form of small apps and software.
Of course, don't forget that good content on your website helps convert visitors to customers because it demonstrates expertise, helps solve problems (and therefore demonstrates willingness to serve) and builds trust.
Sadly the quality of content in all it's forms washing around the internet probably won't improve much as shallow, repetitive content continues to be churned out by the lazy, brigade. At least try and stand out a bit.
The Takeaway: Good content will be really, really, really, really important. Really.
Social networking sites have become critical for getting content out and connecting with audiences – but what content, for who and where?
Attention challenged audiences are becoming increasingly picky about which social platforms they use and how they use them – and mobile now plays a very large part.
The main contenders – Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter are still here but increasing irritation with commercial drivers (ads, promoted posts etc.) along with concerns about privacy and use of personal data is driving uptake of alternatives. Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr for image sharing, Vine for short video. The 'anti-Facebook' site 'Ello'.
Google+ continues to battle, with some calling it 'walking dead' and others still maintaining it is critical for SEO. What is true is that not as many people use it, but include it if local SEO is important.
If buying Facebook likes and Twitter followers hasn't already died it will do so soon as businesses realise it's a waste of time because theses fake followers don't engage and certainly don't buy. Embedding social buttons on your website pages still won't work unless the content is good enough to share, so just adding them to your website design wish list is a waste of time.
Shameless self promotion might work for celebrities but business will need to be more saavy and share engaging, easily digestible content if they want to connect. But easily digestible doesn't mean short and shallow. Ironically, business will need to be more social, to be social.
There is a lot of commentary around video becoming the medium of choice, but this will be hard for a lot of small businesses with limited budgets so think this one will only apply to bigger brands. Micro-video (via the likes of Vine) maybe a solution.
Brands will also become more sophisticated in their use of social media to drive conversions and not just chatter, to justify their investment.
For those that aren't yet embracing social media in some form, entering the game will be harder than it was a few years ago when it was newer and there were fewer choices.
As always the advice is to pick the platform that suits your business and is most relevant for your audience. Think about what resources you have available to put into it so that if you are going to do it, you do it properly.
The Takeaway: If there ever was a time to incorporate social media into your marketing - it's now. But you'll need to do it properly. Social is something you are, not something you do.
SEO is certainly not dead but it is becoming harder to make work as a stand-alone strategy. Having said that, it is as important as ever that you are found by the right people looking for what you have to offer.
Google continues the fight against those that want to hijack search rankings or take the easy route and as a result SEO has become more integrated into and reliant on the overall marketing strategy.
Quality content creation targeting individual audience segment needs and social signals are part of this. There is still a lot of debate about social signals and search rankings – Google says it doesn't take it into account but we're not convinced. Site performance has been important for a while and mobile friendliness now counts as well.
Old fashioned link building is in (i.e. earned links) and we certainly hope to see more progress on Google's algorithm changes that does not reward sites with a high rank purely because of an exact match domain or link farming.
Google is the dominant search engine in New Zealand but we are also starting to see Yahoo and Bing feature in some websites visitor statistics. This could increase in 2015 – last year we noticed Google became full of off-shore (and therefore often meaningless) search results. This was likely due to the 'Pigeon' update which was supposed to improve local searching, but appeared to have the complete opposite effect (see point below).
Following from this, it also means 'local' SEO is more relevant for businesses that operate out of a single location (eg Auckland). Location information (physical address information) and optimising content for local area search terms play a key part.
Targeting single keyword phrases took a radical jump onto the cease-and-desist list last year. Longer keyword phrases in the form of questions and inclusions of context (particularly location) are more powerful and drive more visitors than single search words. This is one reason why content in the form of blog posts, FAQs and articles is so important.
We'd love to see low quality SEO tactics stop working and dodgy SEO offers disappear. Sadly that probably won't happen.
The Takeaway: SEO is no longer something you should buy off a random telemarketer that offers cheap SEO services if you want it to pay off in the long run - or work at all.
To get the kind of insight you need to make decisions from a complex mix of SEO, conversion rates social interactions and mobile - you need good information.
Many predictions for 2014-2015 talk about needing to make data driven decisions, although these tend to focus on using that data to personalise messages, segment audiences, monitor market penetration and get customer insights.
At a more basic level, we've always maintained that you need to understand what is happening on your website. Where are people coming from, how did they get there? What device are they using and what are mobile users doing differently than desktop users?
With more devices and channels than ever before, taking action based on verifiable data ensures the best use of resources and budget. You'll also be able to measure specific campaigns and tactics to see which ones work.
The Takeaway: If you don't know how people find your website and what they do there, chances are the site is ineffective.
While not a marketing consideration per se, your website and it's associated data is a critical marketing asset that needs to be protected.
As recent, high profile breaches of the likes of Sony Entertainment or Barnes and Noble show, no one is too big to be a target. At the same time, small business are just (if not more) likely to be attacked if security is ignored.
Security specialists Kaspersky reported an upsurge in malware incidents and predicts Mac's have come to the attention of cyber-criminals. Vulnerabilities in virtual payment systems will come to the fore, and cloud storage systems may increase due to their popularity.
A compromised website doesn't necessarily mean the hacker will leave a notice saying 'you are hacked' but may be secretly using your site to send out spam or have stolen personal customer information or business intelligence. Malware developers are becoming sneakier and harder to detect.
Last year we also saw a frustrating increase in DDOS (denial of service) attacks - which basically means overloading a web server and preventing anyone accessing a website.
Fortunately, a lot of the attacks on small business websites are trying to pick off the low hanging fruit – i.e. those that have no security practices in place. But don't let that lull you into a thinking you'll slip under cyber-criminals radar.
When it comes to website security – it's a case of when it happens not if.
So in addition to website security hardening and ongoing monitoring, you should have a business continuity plan in place. Education staff on best practise like password standards, locking smartphones and looking out for social phishing attempts should be part of it too.
The Takeway: The longer you assume your web designer and/or hosting provider is taking care of security, the more likely it is your site has already been compromised. The cost of rebuilding a website will far outweigh the cost of good website security practises.
Web design trends are often that – design trends. They often have nothing to do with how well a site functions.
This is a big topic so we won't actually be covering it in this post, but design trends we see include:
We pretty much see the recent design trends continuing from 2014 into 2015, with businesses playing catch up with implementation of responsive and mobile friendly designs.
The Takeaway: Don't confuse a design trend with what is necessarily right or effective for your business. And success in digital marketing takes a lot more than good design.
So – those are our thoughts about website and digital marketing in 2015.
We recommend business use these to help identify priorities for 2015. This means that this time next year we can look back and see if we were right!
]]>Or "You get what you pay for".
Yet hundreds of business owners are being duped by offers of cheap Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
I hesitate to use the word 'lazy' but it has to be because they don't want to, or don't know how to, ask some simple questions and do some digging before handing over the keys to their business reputation.
Please, run a mile if you're offered:
At best it will relieve you of some hard earned revenue. At worst it could mean completely rebuilding your website, your traffic numbers and your reputation from scratch. Sounds like I'm getting a bit hysterical, but I have heard of businesses that end up in exactly this pickle.
I can sympathise with a business that wants to save money, but why take the cheap option and hand over responsibility for something so vital to someone who could do so much damage, without being very sure they could be trusted? Do you hire full time employees the same way? Sorry to sound so grumpy, but it's just not good business.
Professional SEO's are NOT cheap. If you can't stump up the budget, you'd be better off with a modest PPC campaign like Adwords – at least you will get results. Or learn how to do it yourself (Here's a DIY Checklist)
What you get with cheap or shoddy SEO is:
No matter what they tell you. If you want to be on the front page of Google you have to EARN it. And the word 'earn' doesn't exist in the same sentence as 'shortcut'.
Good SEO professionals should talk to you about :
They should also properly manage your expectations and warn you it will take from three to six months to START seeing results.
Anyone willing to share any horror stories or hard earned lessons? Or even challenge the premise?!
]]>It's also because there are so many factors at play that people can get obsessed about one or other tactic hoping it will be the "secret ingredient". SEO can get very complex at the technical end, but people forget to take into account the competitive environment they are in. Sometimes obsessing over duplicate content issues and "page sculpting" simply isn't worth the benefit you get out of it.
And, some people are just regurgitating what they have read or heard – not what they have found out through experience.
Lots of people will say SEO is a waste of time, money and effort. It's true that your could be throwing money away on 'snake oil salesmen' who use dodgy, short-term practices.
It is most likely to be wasted if you don't have your keyword strategy in place. But healthy organic rankings are (once you get them) more effective and sustainable than paid promotional methods.
No - they can't. Not unless they are talking about paid listings such as Adwords. Results vary depending on the competitiveness (which they can only guess at before starting), your budget, how good your products and services are, the size of your market and many other factors some of which are outside any one companies control.
And if your website is new, it will typically take 3-6 months of consistent, focused effort. And it is hard work.
Unlikely – especially following from Google's updates in the first few months of 2012. These specifically targeted practices that built links between sites in a 'group' of sites linking to each other. Links from directories containing thousands of links to other, unrelated businesses not even in the same country are also essentially worthless.
While a site may rank highly purely on the strength of it's back links, it's quite hard to do this if you aren't offering something on your website worth linking back to.
On site SEO is still an important foundation. And we see site's ranking well with almost no back-links, because their on-site SEO is good and their competitors aren't.
Every site works in it's own competitive niche.
It has it's own marketing and content strategy that will affect SEO strategy. The secret is that people looking for a silver bullet can still be fooled into paying thousands of dollars instead of doing the work that everyone knows is necessary.
Google can only determine bounce rate if a website has Google analytics loaded on it – and there are thousands of sites that use other reporting packages. You don't see those sites being penalised do you?.
Also, a single blog article that has amazing insight and thousands of links back to it may well have a 100% bounce rate. But that page will still rank highly.
Find out more about bounce rates and to reduce them
If your site has been built without SEO in mind, it's too late. The structure may not be oriented around search terms, and the technical elements disregarded.
A lot of confused business owners will say their site was optimised by their web developer. And maybe it was, but SEO takes consistent ongoing effort, particularly to build links and target long tail keywords with targeted pages. SEO is as much (if not more) about building roads to your business than about building the destination in the first place.
This one has been around a long time. You don't need to pay to submit your site to any of the search engines. If your site has been built properly they will find it. You can submit a site map to Google which can speed the process up and help make sure it is being indexed properly.
Nope. This one was so well and truly abused that the search engines have been ignoring the keyword tag for a long time.
All it does it make it easier for your competitors to know what keywords you are targeting.
Don't just ask your web designer/developer. A lot of them say yes without understanding anything about SEO.
So, how can you tell?
]]>A 'quality' back link is one that is going to provide a lot of 'link juice'. In other words Google is going to see it as a very positive endorsement of your business and reward your ranking score accordingly.
]]>Google loves good quality, fresh and unique content. That's it. Honest
Give Google what it wants and your place in the search results will benefit as a result.
To work out whether your content is any good, Google uses a complex formula (or algorithm) to give each page on your site a score. The better your score, the higher your site (or page) will rank in Google. No one actually knows what the formula is, and Google changes it all the time anyway, but there is agreement that you need to pay attention to the following:
When planning what content to create, do some reseach so you can match topics that people are actually interested in.
For example, on the Esssentee site our blog post about how much a website costs is one of the most popular. It's a question many people want an answer to. And it is something that web designers and developers are a bit coy about answering - (with good reason).
The more content you have on your site the better, and you can target those long tail keywords that don't get used as much as more generic phrases, but also doesn't have as much competing with it. And the people using them are looking for something very specific so it's often more qualified traffic.
Don't be tempted to copy and paste content from other sources, as duplicate content is penalised.
Well written, insightful content on it's own isn't quite enough, sadly. In Google's eyes, if content is really good, it will get shared.
By this, it means people will link to it - from their own sites, blogs and social sites.
So also think about what you could tell or show people that is so darn valuable that they will want to share it with everyone else.
Now ask yourself - does your mission statement or company history qualify?
]]>Whether you know it or not, your website will be broadcasting certain words and phrases – but they may not be the right ones.
]]>Submitting articles for publication is a popular strategy for getting back-links. Sadly it is one that is frequently abused, by submitting the same, poorly written, keyword stuffed articles to multiple article sites.
Google's Panda update has attempted to tackle this problem, but high ranking sites still show this tactic.
Since Panda, the better article sites are demanding well written valuable and unique content. But you can produce the first version of an article then refine it or re-purpose it slightly depending on the article and who you are targetting and submitting it to.
You can submit an article to a sites like Ezinearticles.com which is one of the biggest article marketing sites, or directly to a subject oriented or news site. Some directory sites like NZS.com also publish articles.
Some publications, especially those that have grown out of traditional media (ie newspapers) are cutting costs by reducing their pool of journalists. They are looking for quality articles to use on their websites. Some 'experts' that appear time and time again might not be any better than the next guy, but they write well and have the confidence to approach these media outlets.
A short article on a big, site that get lots of vistors can get you more traffic than dozens or even hundreds of back links from small, irrelevant sites.
But don't think this is an easy way to get valuable 'Link Juice'. There is a gotcha, and it's to do with something called 'nofollow' tags.
For example, Sean D'Souza frequently has articles in the NZHerald. But the links back to his psychotactics.com website has a 'nofollow' tag. This instructs the search engines not to use the link to influence the link target's search ranking. It means not 'link juice' is passed on. This is designed to prevent search engine spam.
This doesn't matter if you are doing it for brand recognition or traffic, but potentially pointless for SEO - or is it?
Most SEO experts will say that strictly speaking no follow links will not help your rank. But a 'natural' back link profile - ie one done without SEO in mind, will have a combination of follow and no follow links.
And more importantly, they are more likely to generate traffic to your site - which is the whole point about rankings anyway, Yes?
Final note: You will read a lot of SEO experts saying article marketing is dead. We don't 100% agree because it depends on the amount of competition in the market you are targeting and where those articles are published.
]]>One reason why you shouldn't employ them - it's hard to become un-blacklisted or climb back from the ranking wastelands.
First, the distinction between Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO is a bit contentious. The reality is that in many markets, getting a high ranking will necessitate tactics that you wouldn't bother with if search ranking wasn't important. Such as article and directory submissions.
In my view, Black Hat SEO are techniques used to improve search engine results page (SERP) performance in a way that leads to a bad outcome for users and the internet in general. Ones that break search engine rules and create poor user experiences. Automatic website creation, article spinning and blog comment automation are some examples because the end result is rubbish sites with duplicate, poor quality content.
While not 'illegal' or even against anyones guidelines, these techniques are frowned on by search engines and many in the SEO community.
The problem is they may well work in the short term. But if you are contemplating paying someone to improve your SERP ranking and they employ any of these techniques you risk having your site disappear from the search results when Google catches up and changes it's algorithm.
Even if this doesn't happen, the results are not sustainable so you're likely wasting your money anyway.
These techniques include:
Post Penguin and Panda updates to Google's algorithm, site owners are now wondering how to get rid of back links to their site that are coming from 'bad neighbourhoods' or otherwise hurting their ranking. This is hard to do.
This article that explains in detail what can happen when Google decides to penalise tactics like link farming.
Good SEO takes time and effort to do and to get results.
]]>What is needed to leverage social media activity for SEO benefit?