Have you visited a casino?  Or perhaps a shopping centre?  These are good examples of places that intentionally drive your experience.  How?

They make it easy to enter but once you are inside they do a few interesting things like:

1. They never show you a clock.
2. They keep the lighting set in such a way that you can’t determine the time of the day. (In fact some the casinos in Vegas actually have fake day and night routines.)
3. They make the exits hard to find.
4. They place high volume transactional areas away from the entry to draw you past lots of distractors.

Why?

They want you to come deep into their spaces and then they want you to stay.  When you stay you keep spending.

What does this have to do with a website?  You can do the same thing as the casinos / shopping centres.  You can intentionally drive people into parts of your site that will covert sales.  Whether that’s a product or service or something else you know your customers value.   Generally though you want to do it by providing quick access rather than trying to make people stay.  But the theory holds true.

You just need to ensure the customer finds what they need quickly, efficiently.  You will get better traction and your customers will tell you your site is easy to navigate.  Try it.  Put a high sale item on the home page and see what happens.  Then try the same thing with a low seller and see if you can get it to sell more.

By the way… in the digital spaces Facebook and Youtube use the same strategies of keeping you on their site for as long as possible to sell you advertising space.  So this strategy works in the digital space.  So why not follow the example of the big players?  Not sure where to begin?  Send us a message and we will optimise your customer paths.

You are probably familiar with the simple real estate axioms like location, location, location.

What a lot of other people don’t realise the same is also true with respect to the screen location and the placement of content on your website.    There have been a number of eye tracking studies performed to understand what people look at and if it varies and more importantly can it be influenced.

The standard “F” map still holds true and the inverted L is also still valid but the influence of images has always been a catalyst to break these standard consumption pathways, particularly if the image is provocative or if it resonates well with your target audience.

This article provides some excellent examples of this process: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-tracking-studies/

The other thing to notice is the image of the baby.  The heat map gives a very strong message about how humans behave.  When there is an image of a face we respond very strongly to it.

From infancy we have been told to look people in the face.  Since then we have learnt the value of looking at the face to get social cues and nonverbal responses.  The face is super important to us.  This study highlights the value of a face in an image on websites.  Of course the image needs to be closely tied to a call to action to get any real value.

Anyway have a look at the article and tell me about your take on it.  If you want more information why not give us a call?

Before we start I want to raise some reality checks.

• People are busy.
• Fans miss content, and if they miss content you can bet humble customers will miss a lot more.

We work with a lot of companies to support the creation of content.  We provide a range of strategies to ensure the seeds of their content are varied so they have a lot of angles and topics to cover but easily the biggest and easiest strategy is content recycling.

This is not to suggest having the same content appear and then reappear weekly or even monthly but every 6 months or 12 months probably isn’t a problem.  That way you can do two things:

1. Keep your messaging tight
2. Reduces your overheads for content creation

We have found customers will re-engage with the content and it may feel familiar but it’s really rare for them to realise it’s a rehash.   Even if they do they will often sent the website owner comments like, I missed so many things the first time I read this OR glad you reposted this as its great information.

That’s really the key.  If the information is good your customer won’t mind seeing it more than once.  If it’s bad or even average, they probably won’t want to see it, ever.

So make sure its high quality and go ahead and reuse it.  We work with some great applications that automate this entire process!  Want to know more?  Contact us today.

If you’ve been in business for a while you will know that the clever folks over at Google keep making changes on how websites are ranked.

While there is always uncertainty about the final mix we know if done correctly social content and currency of content impact its algorithms.  If you think about it, it just makes sense.

While it’s easy to create website content that frames you as an expert it is much harder to fake social content.  As a result google seeks this as a potentially more authentic information source.  By having inbound links from these sources with link text that leverages key phrases you will get value.

Check this article for more information: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/01/27/6-social-media-practices-that-boost-seo/#ddb2c0a3d171

The freshness of content is also important.  Google loves websites that update regularly.  From their perspective these sites have the greatest chance of giving their customers the best/latest answer to their search questions.

Check this article for more information about ranking factors: https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/26/guide-to-google-ranking-signals-part-4-content-freshness/

So if Google wants fresh content and it values social content why not use your activity in your social channels to create a solution.

Placing a social feed on your website ensures the content you are posting on the social channels is reflected on your home page.  This gives you the hit for social content and the regularly updated content benefit.

This approach is particularly useful if your website was built in a way that makes updating content difficult.  This way you don’t have to use the website tools, just keep posting on your social channels.  Awesome!  But what happens if you run out of things to talk about?  It doesn’t matter where you post the content if you have nothing to say.  I will talk about this next!  But if you want more information contact us today.

Imagine walking along a street of grocery stores.  You walk into one store and find the products are stale and there is dust on the shelves.  What do you do?

Most people would walk out leave and/or complain.  And everyone would pick one of the many other grocery stores on the street!  Most people probably haven’t had this experience… or have they?

The reality is, this happens every single day.  When searching on google users are presented with a long list of potential businesses that offer that service or product.

When a potential customer walks into a digital shop front (a website) they will make a decision on whether they will buy from the business in a few moments.  Will those few minutes reveal old content.

Think about your own website.  Does it have fresh content that creates interest?  Will your potential customers be excited by what they see on your shelves?  Or like many businesses will they see old content?  First impressions are lasting.   What impression does your website create?

With thousands of your competitors available to potential customers via the back button can you afford to lose customers due to old products / information sitting on the shelves?

Of course there is another side to this story.  Customers are not the only visitors to your website.  Google loves fresh content.  Have a look at this article that explains why:

https://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor-new

Take the time, make the effort.  Both Google and potential customers will love it almost as much as your bottom line!  Want to know how to keep the creative juices flowing?  Give us a call today at +61-073-351-2239 or visit us at https://webmate1.wpengine.com/.