What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Internet marketing is a kind of science. Like any science or discipline, as internet marketing has evolved it has accumulated a large array of specialized terms that are difficult to understand for anyone who doesn’t work in the field. Legal jargon is perhaps the most commonly referenced example of how the specialized terms in any profession, used casually by those in the profession, sound like nonsense to the general public. Prima facie, Habeus corpus, provisional remedy, rejoinder and punitive damages are examples of terms that sound weird to most people but are commonly used within the legal profession. An example of such a word that may be inaccessible to the layman but is a part of regular discourse within the profession of internet marketing is conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization is perhaps best understood alongside a similar term: unconversion optimization rate. These two internet marketing terms are abbreviated as CRO and uCRO, respectively. So, just what are conversion rate optimization (CRO) and unconversion rate optimization (uCRO), and how do they affect your business? Here is a brief summary.

 

Conversion Rate Optimization

 

 

CRO refers to the general process by which a company uses analytics and feedback to improve the effectiveness of their website. Effectiveness is usually defined as customers making a purchase on the website. Basically, when a customer visits a website, they enter into a decision-making process. This decision-making process might be positive from the perspective of the company (the customer decides to purchase their product) or negative (the customer takes one look at the website and leaves immediately). CRO seeks to determine what exactly on the website is influencing this decision-making process and then adjusting the website in order to encourage customers to purchase from the website. Influencing behavior in this way may seem complicated at first. This is usually done, however, via a simple process known as A/B testing. Internet marketers will simply alter one aspect of the website, measure the results, alter it again, measure those results and then compare the results of A with the results of B.

 

Unconversion Rate Optimization

 

Conversion rate optimization focuses on converting visitors into customers. Unconversion rate optimization, however, focuses on the specific reasons why visitors are not converted into customers. Internet marketers who focus only on CRO fail to understand that preventing customers from taking negative actions (like leaving their website) can increase profits just as much as influencing them to take positive actions. There are several ways internet marketers use unconversion rate optimization to discourage customers from taking negative actions, some of which many are already familiar with. Perhaps the most recognizable example of an effort to manipulate uCRO is on a cancellation page. It is always a good idea to provide a quick and easy way for customers to cancel orders or subscriptions, but it doesn’t hurt to ask them why they are doing so. While many cancellation pages offer a drop-down menu where a customer is asked to state the reason for their cancellation, very few pages have a built-in response to each specific reason for the cancellation. This can be a way to retain customers that you were otherwise about to lose. Other opportunities for uCRO are on refund & return pages and support pages. In short, if your online marketing does not include a uCRO strategy, you may be unnecessarily losing customers and profits.

from American Marketing | Marketing Firm | Christian Marketing Company https://www.marketingofamerica.com/internet-marketing/content-marketing/what-is-conversion-rate-optimization/

Social Media Marketing Strategies

By this point early in 2017, most businesses are familiar with most basic social media marketing strategies. Even you know your company could do more with social media, you are likely familiar with what needs to be done. For one, you probably understand that your business should have at least some presence across many different social media platforms. Ideally, you should be able to connect with your potential customers on any social media platform they might use. You might also know the basic purpose of interacting with your customers on social media. It builds awareness of your business, for one. Effective social media marketing also builds your brand; depending on the quality of your communication over the social media platforms, social media activity can both positively and negatively affect your brand. The results of a strong social media presence are also well documented. Nearly all businesses understand and many have seen firsthand the ability of social media to generate sales and leads. If you already accept these basic functions of social media marketing, it might be beneficial to consider some less-understood social media strategies. Many of these strategies involve making sure your company is making productive use of mistakes that are common on social media. Here are a few examples.

 

 

Misspellings

 

When keeping track of social media accounts, it is a good idea for companies to monitor the mentions of their company just as closely as they monitor the content that comes from their own accounts. One thing that companies that do so begin to notice is that their company’s brand name and product names are often misspelled. Obviously, short of a nation-wide spelling initiative, there is not much company’s can do about their customers’ spelling proficiency. What companies can do, however, is monitor these misspellings and still acknowledge and respond to the customers who make them. Social media teams need to be aware and proactive in monitoring the most common spelling mistakes of their brand name or product names. This allows for effective engagement with customers who make the mistakes. Failure to respond to either positive or negative feedback can negatively affect a social media brand.

 

Other Mistakes

 

There are common mistakes beyond misspellings that companies need to be aware of. Many people on Twitter, for example, have a tendency to use hashtags, #, instead of the @ symbol when attempting to communicate with a company. Thus, the comment will not make it to the company’s mentions and would only be revealed if the term is searched for by the company. A good social media marketer searches for these possible mistakes proactively. Sometimes your company’s name or product names are mentioned using abbreviations and sayings as opposed to their full names. Again, being vigilant in searching for these mentions that are relevant to your company can be the difference between a good social media presence and a great one. The very best social media marketers possess the same attention to detail when it comes to their misspellings and mistakes made when customers talk about their competitors as well. Many companies’ overall social media strategies involve the comprehensive tracking of competitors’ social media presence and impact just as closely as their own.

from American Marketing | Marketing Firm | Christian Marketing Company https://www.marketingofamerica.com/internet-marketing/social-media-marketing/social-media-marketing-strategies/

New HTTPS Google Chrome Security Requirement

Any business that depends on their website should make it a habit to track announcements made by Google. The search engine has become so intricately woven into the fabric of the internet that any change the company makes has a big impact. Simply being aware of these changes can make a big difference in the success of your website and your business. Not all businesses are in the habit of keeping tabs on Google’s announcements in this way, so doing so can give you a leg up. Sometimes, the changes they announce are minor; other times, Google makes a major change that is vital for companies to know about and understand. Sometimes these changes have to do with marketing, such as search engine optimization, business rankings, and website development. Other times, they may relate to other topics, like the major change that has just been announced and is related to a security requirement that Google Chrome is going to require all websites to have.

 

HTTPS Requirement

 

 

If a website collects sensitive information from visitors, Google has announced, the site must use HTTPS hosting to be considered secure. Sites collecting sensitive information that do not have HTTPS by the end of January, 2017 will be marked by Chrome as non-secure. Examples of sensitive information include any type of sensitive, personal information like passwords and credit card information. Being classified as a non-secure site could have obviously potential consequences for a website or business. A visitor to a site listed as non-secure might obviously be less willing to engage and conduct business on the site by creating an account or making a purchase. Google announced further that even if the sensitive information is collected on only a certain section or individual page of the website, the entire site must be protected by HTTPS.

 

Why HTTPS?

 

Why would Google mandate such a strict HTTPS requirement? The announcement comes amidst growing online security concerns. Large-scale and well-publicized hacking events have contributed to widespread concern from the public over the safety and security of their personal information online. Requiring HTTPS is partly an effort on Google’s part to reassure users that their data is safe. And HTTPS does make sensitive information safer. Without HTTPS, it is much easier for this sensitive information to be stolen. In keeping with their designs to reassure users, Google’s effort to make HTTPS the norm for sites collecting personal information has been branded the #NoHacked campaign.

 

Should Your Site Switch To HTTPS?

 

For a variety of reasons, it is advisable to take Google’s announcement seriously and make the switch to HTTPS if you do not employ it already. Google Chrome holds over 50% of the market share for desktop and mobile web browsers; thus, being flagged as non-secure on this platform could have a drastic impact on your website’s business and traffic. Additionally, Google has incentivized websites to make the switch by giving those who do an increase in how they rank in searches. Sites who are not on HTTPS hosting should consider looking up a step-by-step guide to transition to HTTPS. As stated above, Google’s announcement cautions that sites collecting sensitive information that do not do so will begin to be flagged as non-secure at the end of January 2017.

from American Marketing | Marketing Firm | Christian Marketing Company https://www.marketingofamerica.com/seo/new-https-google-chrome-security-requirement/

Basic Tactics Needed To Survive Local SEO In 2017

Basic Tactics Needed To Survive Local SEO In 2017

A Beginners Guide On How To Write Blogs In 2017

Is the process of effectively writing and maintaining a blog on your company’s website any different in 2017 than it was in 2016? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes. Of course, just how you update and adapt your company’s online blog for 2017 is largely dependent on the reasons you have for maintaining the blog in the first place. Perhaps the reason you maintain a blog is to communicate with an already well-established customer base, and you have no desire or reason to grow your business and have no competition in your industry or niche market space. If that’s the case, you might feel comfortable blogging the way you always have.

 

Utilizing Your Blog Successfully

Most companies that maintain blogs or are thinking about starting a blog, however, don’t have such a luxury of being able to put their business on cruise control. Most businesses are looking to utilize their blog as an integral part of a larger internet marketing strategy to develop their brand, content marketing,  get ahead of their competition, increase their online presence, local public relations, and generally grow their business. A successful blog can help achieve all of these goals, and a blog becomes successful only through careful attention to the ever-changing rules of the blogosphere. The reason the rules of blog writing are always changing is that Google and other search engines are always fine-tuning the algorithmic method they use to assess the quality of your blog. Thus, a blog that is well-written and informative may be satisfying to you personally as a business owner; however, if it does not embody an awareness of the most recent standards search engines use to rank your website, it may not be doing much to attract new customers to your website. There is always more to learn on this topic, but you have to start somewhere. Here is a look at a few important aspects of writing a blog post in 2017.

 

A Few Guide Lines To Following When Writing Your Blog

1. Always have a header 1 tag. Make sure your title is well thought out and has the potential to rank. Utilize the header 2 tag to further your conversation about the header 1 tag.

 

2. Add images and videos to your blog that are geo tagged if you are a local business and have a specific location you want to increase your presence in, if not, you don’t have to geo tag your blog, because it will not really help.

 

3. Write to explain or teach. Do not just write a blog to write about something for SEO purpose, because your blogging strategy will fail.

 

4. After you write your blog, make sure you distribute it. I am not talking about just hitting the like button.  I am talking about real blog distribution that can help syndicate your content and possibly make it go viral.  If you don’t have a system like this setup, you shouldn’t even blog until you do, because it’s a waste of time and money.

 

 

Inner Linking Throughout Your Blogs

As search engines adjust the lens through which they view your blog, and website as a whole, certain factors take on a larger, more important role while certain factors may become less relevant. This can be very frustrating for internet marketers, but paying attention, being flexible and adjusting are part of the skill-set required of a savvy internet marketer. One factor that is becoming increasingly important to the success of a website or blog—success being defined as how highly it is ranked in search engines—is known as inner linking. Proper inner linking is crucial for the success of a blog post in 2017. Inner linking, or internal linking, refers to posting content in which certain text on the page links to other relevant pages on your company’s website. For example, a construction company’s blog post about the different types of energy efficient windows available on the market may include a word in the text that links to another blog post about how to customers can decide which windows are right for them. The best inner linking always links to specific, relevant pages that further a conversation or provide more in-depth information about a certain phrase, paragraph or term.

 

SEO Your Blog

SEO has always been an important part of maintaining a blog. SEO (search engine optimization) refers, of course, to the process of improving a website’s ranking when certain words are searched for using Google or another search engine. This can obviously improve the visibility of a website, increase traffic and ultimately lead to more customers. In 2017, it remains one of the most important factors for the success of your website. The rules, though, as mentioned previously, have changed to a considerable degree when it comes to proper SEO. One major change involves the practice of using keywords in blogs as a means of increasing that page’s recognition by the algorithms Google uses to rank a site. In the past, it was possible to orient a blog post entirely around certain keywords. These keyword-oriented blogs will no longer produce such positive results for companies and writers. In fact, Google is now more likely to de-rank a page when it picks up on the possibility that it is keyword-stuffed, whether by design or by accident. Instead of being overly populated with keywords, blogs should be focused on the brand or on a particular subject. As Google’s algorithms advance, so too must the knowledge and practices of a sustainable, successful blog.  Again write a blog so it teaches someone something, a how to based, a guide, or something that has meaning.

If you need help with local SEO services, blog writing, or content marketing in general please feel free to contact us for a free quote.

from American Marketing | Marketing Firm | Christian Marketing Company https://www.marketingofamerica.com/a-beginners-guide-on-how-to-write-blogs-in-2017/

How To Increase Your Google PageSpeed Insight Score In 2017

How in the world does Google determine the order of the websites that show up after you perform a search using the search engine? Whether you’re the owner of a local or national business, you might have a follow-up question. How do I improve my local seo ranking of my website so that people who search for my products and/or services see my website first? The answer to both of these questions is that Google uses algorithms—complicated formulas that use a number of factors to determine how relevant and useful a website’s content is to the search that was performed.

 

The algorithm is complicated in that it takes into consideration hundreds of different factors when it determines where to rank a website. Oh yeah, another reason the Google ranking algorithm is so complicated is that Google doesn’t disclose exactly what those factors are. Thus, there is some mystery and uncertainty surrounding the ranking process for even the most skilled and experienced internet marketers. Because a website’s ranking in search results is so important, however, many companies and individuals have devoted considerable time and energy to discovering the major factors used by Google’s algorithm. Some of the most important factors are keyword usage, time spent on a website, number/quality of inbound links, site structure and site speed.  Take for example our Indianapolis SEO Services page for our own company.  It has been mapped out, thought out, inner linked properly, optimized, distributed, syndicated, written time and time again, and finally setup for conversions.  Setting up a website or even a single page should be thought through, not just put up and forgot about.

 

This post will focus on the important factor of site speed. Luckily, companies do have a metric they can look at to get a sense of their site speed: Google’s PageSpeed Insight Tool. Improving this score number can improve your site’s ranking and ultimately lead more traffic to your site and more customers to your business. You probably now have a much more specific question than when we started. How do you increase your Google PageSpeed Insight Score?

 

How Can I Find Out My Site’s Score?

The tool, available free from Google via a quick search, will access a given URL twice, once each with a mobile user-agent and a desktop-user agent. After accessing the URL in each of these ways, Google gives you what is called a PageSpeed Insights.

 

What Is The Score?

The first step toward understanding how to increase your Google PageSpeed Insight Score is to gain some knowledge about the score itself and what Google is trying to assess by using it. The PageSpeed Insight Score measures a website page’s speed and performance on both mobile and desktop devices. This score can be anywhere on a scale from 0 to 100 points, with 100 being the best. According to Google, any score at 85 or above generally means that a site is performing well and has a good site speed.

 

The Score Changes

Google also notes, in keeping with the theme of this post, that a site’s PageSpeed Insight Score will fluctuate as they continue to improve on or change the rules of how they determine the speed of a site. A common problem for the websites of many companies is that they may not have closely tracked their score over time. While the site may not have initially had any obvious problems with site speed, as Google has adjusted their analysis the site may have lagged behind in critical areas. As is the case with many aspects of SEO, effective site speed is not something that can be achieved and then forgotten about. The business owner, staff or another internet marketing service professional must constantly monitor the site speed with a tool like PageSpeed Insight in order to ensure that a site maintains its ranking in search results.

 

How Can It Be Improved?

It should be noted at this point that while your site’s PageSpeed Insight Score can directly affect a site’s ranking with Google, it has not been released exactly how much of an impact it has.  As it does effect rankings, many consider it to be worth constant attempts, through monitoring,  at improving. To understand how to improve the score, all you have to do is look at how exactly Google is measuring speed.

 

Step 1.  Optimize your images – Don’t take out geo information that could be useful to them is some great information we will give.  Plugin tools like Optimus Image Optimizer is a great plugin that we use to optimize website.

 

Step 2. Minify Javascript and CSS – use the plugin called Autoptimize Plugin.  Make sure you go through this and check the optimize html code, optimize javascript code, and optimize CSS code.   We also recommend using WordPress Cache Enabler, this plugin will solve all of the cache plugins Google asks for.

 

Step 3.  Elimante Render-Blocking Code – We like to use Font Awesome CDN project.  Use thise on your site and it will help with this issue.  There are many other tools that are available in the plugin area that can help with this issue as well.

 

Step 4. To further Browser Caching if your site is still having issues, we recommend trying a few different plugins since each template is different.  Try Rocket, KeyCDN with WordPress CDN enabler Plugin, you can use Cloudflare, or search for more plugins in the plugin area of WordPress.  The above plugins and services generally work in every scenario though that we have come across.

 

Step 5. Enbale Compression throughout your website – Utilizing Gzip is an easy way to compress files in your website.  If you are handy in the .htaccess you can achieve this easy.  If you are not then we recommend you find a plugin that will help you with this such as Gzip Ninja Speed Compression plugin you can download in WordPress.

 

Step 6. Reduce your server response time.  Cloudflare or using a CDN like KeyCDN will work great for this if you have a slow host.

 

Step 7.  We also recommend removing query strings.  A great free plugin we utilize is called Query Strings Remover.

 

 

Further explanation about what you are doing and what it means in the steps above.

Time to Above-The-Fold Load

 

One way Google measures the speed of a website and derives the site’s PageSpeed Insight Score is by measuring the time to above-the-fold load. This simply is the amount of time it takes from when a user requests a new page to when the browser is able to render the above-the-fold content of the site.

 

Time To Full Page Load

Of course, another logical way site speed is measured by Google is in time to full page load. This is the amount of time it takes from when a user requests a new page to when the browser is able to render the entire page of the site.

 

Network-Independent Factors

Many would probably argue at this point that the loading speed is largely determined by the performance of a network connection. Google understands this; as a result, they only measure network-independent aspects of the site’s speed. These network-independent factors include server configuration, HTML structure, images, JavaScript and CSS. These are all factors entirely within the control of the company and/or the site’s designers. When you check your Insight Score with Google, they will provide suggestions related to how well the aforementioned network-independent factors are performing for your site. You will see a green check mark next to the factors where Google found no significant issues. For example, a green check mark associated with the HTML structure of the site means that the site’s HTML structure is not dragging down its Insight Score. A yellow exclamation point next to a factor indicates that this may be an issue to consider fixing, especially if there is an easy fix to be implemented. A red exclamation point indicates not only that there is an issue with the associated aspect of the site, but also that fixing the issue would result in a measurable impact on the page’s performance (speed).

 

Mobile Speed

Increasingly, the mobile component of Google’s PageSpeed Insight Score is given increasing weight. A low score on the mobile side of things can dramatically impact a site’s ranking to the point where it may not even show up in search results. Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller notes that in 2017 they may even incorporate the mobile PageSpeed Insight Score into the ranking algorithm itself. This means that mobile site speed is something to continually monitor if you want to maintain or improve upon your ranking in Google search results going forward.

 

 

More Issues To Take Into Consideration

When you link your Google map or my maps to your page, it’s going to be in an Iframe source which can slow your webpage down consider.  Make sure that your location pages are loaded with too many pictures, or sources that will slow your page down.

 

Most important

If you need help implementing any of these steps, please contact

https://www.marketingofamerica.com today and we will be happy to help.

from American Marketing | Marketing Firm | Christian Marketing Company https://www.marketingofamerica.com/how-to-increase-your-google-pagespeed-insight-score-in-2017/

Bad SEO Tactics That Penalize

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from American Marketing | Marketing Firm | Christian Marketing Company https://www.marketingofamerica.com/bad-seo-tactics-that-penalize/