The last HEROweb Marketing Bite showed you how to leverage Google Analytics’ demographic reporting to see what kind of audience is visiting your site. This week we’re recommending that you make sure you target your content to engage with the different audiences your website is attracting.

Google and Bing are constantly refining their algorithms to produce the best, most relevant search results. (For reference check out our article on the last major Google update, Google Hummingbird.) Searching for “buy shoes” and “how to buy shoes” returns very different results. This is because the search engines recognize that someone searching for “buy shoes” is looking to make a purchase, whereas someone searching for “how to buy shoes” is likely seeking information on the process of making a purchase, but is less likely to be at the stage of actually buying anything.

With this in mind, it’s important that your content targets more than just important keywords, but also targets the different kinds of audiences using those keywords. Make sure you have different pages set up for people who are looking to make a purchase and people who are trying to do research. Even though someone may not be ready to make a purchase yet, if you establish yourself as a trustworthy source by ranking highly in Google and Bing searches for these types of queries, researchers may soon become your customers.

Consumers in the United States, and around the world in fact, are using their smartphones more and more. Mobile marketing, or “M-commerce” as it is now coming to be called, is growing in importance.

Did you know these facts about mobile usage?

1. Mobile use is growing at a rate 14 times that of traditional laptop access.

2. 10.3% of all global searches are made from mobile devices.

3. 28.5 % of searches in the U.S. are made from mobile devices.

4. 1 in 4 Americans use only a smartphone to connect to the internet (not a computer).

5. There are 5 times as many cell phones in the world as there are PCs.

6. Nielsen reported an 89% increase in mobile data usage between 2012 and 2011.

7. Research from Prosper Mobile Insights says that 81% of smartphone users have done product research via smartphone and 50% have made a purchase with one.

8. Traffic from smartphones and tablets jumped 155% on 2012’s Black Friday compared with average daily mobile traffic for a group of 26 retailers that are part of the Branding Brand Mobile Commerce Index.

9. 57% of smartphone owners who made a purchase, did so after receiving a marketing email message.

10. By 2014, mobile internet is expected to overtake desktop usage.

Maybe by now you’ve figured out what all this means…The Top Trend in Business for 2013 is Mobile Access.

What does this mean for you? Are you considering mobile marketing in your budget for the coming year? Have you investigated what percentage of traffic your site gets from mobile devices? (Learn how to check Google Analytics for your mobile traffic stats.)

In the romanticized version of the web business, blogging is holds great appeal: you set up a blog, start writing some posts, attract scores of visitors, and see your revenue climb as these visitors morph into devoted customers who continually buy your products.

And then there is reality. Blogging takes perseverance, killer writing skills, and a strong tie-in between your blog theme and your product line. In order to actually convert your dedicated readers into paying customers, you have some work to do.

We see many site owners start a blog with grand ambitions, only to have the ambitions quickly whither as they struggle to find a voice and a readership. A blog lying fallow, with one or two posts during the course of a year, can cause more harm than good.

If you have an Ecommerce site and are considering getting start with a blog, we have a better recommendation: get started with an articles section on your website.

A simple articles section might not be quite as cool as a blog. But we urge you to forgo the fancy bells and whistles, plugins, and social widgets – at least when you are getting started – and focus on writing a handful of great articles at a pace that feels right to you. Your users won’t feel let down if you have an articles section on your site with occasional high-value entries. But if you have a blog link on your site, you better be prepared to back it up with some action.

Once you develop your voice, assuming you do write enough posts to develop a clear voice, you can upgrade your article section to a full-featured blog, including comments, a calendar, and some of the other niceties that come with blogging platforms, like WordPress. But before you get ahead of yourself, write a few simple articles. One step at a time is the surest way to get to where you are going.

I might be a mobile shop-a-holic. Just this past week, I made holiday-related purchases from my iPhone while watching TV, while attending my daughter’s swim team practice session (oops), and while standing in line…at the mall. Why do I do it, you ask? Could it be the overwhelming feeling of satisfaction I get from multitasking, and thus saving myself a few moments of precious time? How about that well-deserved chuckle I enjoy after purchasing a gift that won’t be traced on the family computer? Or perhaps it’s the thrill of cashing in on a fantastic deal offered exclusively to the mobile me? Maybe I just prefer tapping and scrolling to pointing and clicking or, better yet — to standing in line.

Whatever my reasons, I know one thing’s for sure: I’m not alone. According to Shopify, 25% of purchases this holiday season will be made from a mobile device. Next year’s projections are looking at nearly twice that volume. With constant improvements in the world of mobile technology, coupled with the increasing trend of offering mobile-only promotions to shoppers on-the-go, the mobile market is growing as a preferred platform for bringing home the goods.

Small businesses can make a big splash by running mobile-only promotions for their customers who, like me, are willing and able to shop any time, any where. By leveraging the inherently impulsive nature of mobile shopping with time-sensitive promotions offered exclusively to smartphone users (e.g., Free Shipping on Black Friday or 10% off all purchases on Cyber Monday), e-tailers can make the most of their mobile strategy.

So, if you have an eCommerce website and want to attract fanatical shoppers like me, here are a few tips:

• Set up some mobile-only promotions that will work exclusively for your mobile shoppers.
• Promote your mobile shopping experience on your desktop sites. The mobile warriors out there will appreciate that you are catering to them.
• Keep your mobile site lean and mean. You don’t need every element of your desktop site available via mobile. Mobile shoppers want things to happen quickly!

Check out the resources that HEROweb offers for Tapping into Mobile.

The title of this blog post might seem sacrilegious coming from a company that designs websites. Let me explain.

We recently designed a new website for a company that had been in business for several years and had a pre-existing website. The website was inefficient for a number of reasons, and they came to us wanting more control over the content, which our proprietary Site Manager software allows, and they wanted a website that was organized more efficiently. Sounds like the right thing to do, right?

The problem arose when they told us, after the new site had been online for a month, that their sales had drastically fallen. Some follow up conversations revealed a few reasons why this had happened.

First of all, the previous site was so poorly designed for online sales that customers had to call the business to make their purchase. The previous site had almost one hundred images in a slideshow that people would look through, and then call up and say, “I want THAT one.” Problem is, the new site is designed to make online purchasing so much easier, that no one has to call anymore. Turns out, the sales team was particularly adept at closing sales over the telephone. The new site doesn’t offer that same impulse to talk to someone on the phone.

Furthermore, because this particular business sells items that are fairly expensive, they were always flexible about taking a deposit, doing multi-part billing and payments, etc. But the only purchase option on the new site was an add-to-cart button for the full price. There was no information available about their payment flexibility.

Now that we are aware of these issues, we are taking steps to introduce the right calls-to-action and design elements on the site, so that they can have the same telephone touch with their customers and payment flexibility that they used to have.

What could have helped avoid this situation? If you as the business owner are considering a new website, have an open and honest conversation about how your business works with your web designer. If much of your business comes from phone calls, tell your web designer. Even if they don’t ask, get this information on the table. We are here to do the best job we can for your business. Our business is only successful when YOUR business is successful.

There are certain industry best practices surrounding website design that work in most cases, but every business is unique. It’s important that the lines of communication are open, because the needs of your business are not going to be the same for any other business, even if you are in the same industry. Knowing just what you need and how your business works helps us create the best website experience for you and your customers.

Got questions? We’ve got answers!

We know that our customers have questions . . . don’t worry, most busy business owners and webmasters do have questions, no matter how knowledgeable they are!

We’d like to invite you to post your questions here in the comments section, or on HEROweb Marketing & Design’s Facebook page, and we will answer them for you. If you aren’t comfortable posting your questions publicly, feel free to send us your question in a private message. We will answer your questions on our Facebook page every couple of days.

We don’t consider any question a “dumb” or “pointless” question, so please feel free to ask about anything you’ve been wondering about but didn’t know who to ask or were too shy to ask.

We’ve posted the first question and answer on our Facebook page already: Is it important to have my own SSL certificate, or can I use a shared SSL certificate?

Other questions that are in the queue to be answered are:

• Is it a big problem if I fail PCI scans?
• Should I sell my products on Amazon?
• How can I stop competitors from coming up when searching for my business name?
• What is the correct frequency for updating my home page?
• I am concerned about people bad-mouthing my business in public? Should I just stay off of social media?

What are YOUR business-related questions?

What would you call this image?

The exact number of websites that Google indexes is not known, but it is known that Google receives several million search queries each day, and the number of pages it sifts through to respond to those searches is in the trillions.

Trillions.

Yeah. And Google indexes and displays images in much the same way as it indexes websites. It’s easy to see that a non-search engine friendly image will get “lost” amid all of that. So, how can you make Google’s job easier?

Keep in mind that Google’s search engine spiders are essentially “robots” that can’t “see” images like you do. They can only “read” the text that is associated with any particular image.

Here’s an example of how complicated images can be: Think of the term “gas.”

You might have a photo that you have labeled “gas” and think that you have been pretty descriptive about what that image is. But, “gas” can refer to gasoline for a car. It can refer to oxygen. (Is “oxygen” referring to a tank of medical oxygen for a patient, or atmospheric gas?) It can refer to a gas burner on a stove. It can refer to natural gas. It can refer to natural gas of a different sort, as in belching or flatulence. See? Detail is crucial.

There is no way that Google’s search engines can tell what type of gas you mean, if “gas” is the only tag, or title, that you have given the photo.

Google search engines (and I’m using Google as a shorthand to refer to all major search engines, as they all function in relatively similar manners) look at the image’s filename, anchor text that points to it, and its “alt text.” I’ll explain more about what this is. If these textual cues are absent, then Google looks at the content on the page the image was found on to learn more about the image. Other important cues are also the page’s title. But, the tags that you put directly on the image are the most important.

To help make sure your images are indexed:

1. Make sure that the image filename is related to the image’s content: “gasoline” if it’s a gas pump; “oxygen” if it’s atmospheric gas, etc.

2. Enter something descriptive in the alt field that describes the visual components of the image in a human-friendly way. More about this…the “alt text” is what displays when the image can’t load for some reason. It is also what is spoken aloud by reader programs used by people with visual impairment when they search the web. Much like search engines, they can’t see the images, so they must rely on text. If your image is a gas pump, such as the one in this post, you might include “Driver filling fuel tank on a blue compact car from a gasoline pump at a gas station” in your alt text. If for some reason the image can’t load, such as if the user is connecting to the Internet via a slow dial up connection or they have images turned off, then “Driver filling fuel tank on a blue compact car from a gasoline pump at a gas station.” will appear in place of the image.

3. Try and place the image next to the content on the page that the image relates to.

4. Avoid displaying images in a JavaScript, as search engines can’t “read” code in this format.

5. Give your image a title. The title tag field is what displays when someone hovers a cursor over the image.

If you’re considering hiring an SEO company, or perhaps you already have, then chances are you’ve invested some significant funds into both your website and your marketing efforts and you don’t want it to fail. As a company that provides complete website design and development services from conceptualizing a website to Pay-Per-Click advertising, no one wants you to succeed more than we do. But sometimes SEO clients get in the way of their own success.

First of all, SEO is search engine optimization of a web site’s content. This is a synonym for any or all of the activities related to optimization: primarily, keyword research, linking campaigns, web analytics, and content creation. The best SEO campaigns work not because the client hands over all decision-making to the SEO professional, but because there is a balance between the client’s in-depth understanding of their business, and the advice of the SEO pro. SEO professionals are discreet when making changes to a client’s site, and understand that the best SEO happens “behind the scenes,” so to speak. It should be relatively invisible and only serve to increase the usability and relevance of the content on your site.

There are two things that are crucial to the success of an SEO campaign:

1. Clients must be involved in the SEO campaign. We ask that our clients not only implement our recommendations in a timely manner, but that they share their knowledge of their business with us to develop long-term strategies for success.

2. Clients must get over their “tweakophobia.” You have to trust us. This means having a willingness to adapt to change. We can’t help if you don’t want changes made to your site. If you don’t want to change how your page titles look, or you don’t want to target keywords in your text, or you don’t like the way that links look “highlighted,” then why did you hire an SEO company? There is nothing wrong with clients asking questions, but most of the time making the right changes leads to positive results, and we wouldn’t make a recommendation to you unless we truly felt it would work.

If you get bogged down in the process and just aren’t comfortable allowing someone else to work on your site, it is possible to achieve high placement in the search engine results without using professional optimization services. After years in this business, we’ve seen all types of sites rank highly, but the sites that rank highly with poor optimization typically have something else going for them, such as high-profile brand recognition or a high-quality incoming link profile. So, if you don’t like the idea of letting someone else tweak your site, you will need to build your online success through focusing on an alternate area.

From time to time, I get emails from customers saying that they have decided to move on from having an online business and they are wondering if I can tell them how much their online business is worth.

Business valuation is a tough one and we certainly are no experts in that arena. But we do have some insights on the topic. Here are some of the factors that a prospective buyer will likely consider in determining what they will pay.

1. Customer Base

There is no question that a large and active customer base is a great asset. If you have 30,000 account holds on your website, that would likely have value to a prospective buyer. Building a customer base and continually communicating with them is an important practice on many levels.

2. Inventory

You need to consider whether you want to sell just your website or all the product inventory that goes along with it. Some buyers will be quite interested in your inventory and others will just want access to your customers.

3. Website

As you know, investing the money in a professional website as well as the time to build out all the content is significant. Buyers who are knowledgeable about what it involves to build a full-featured site will understand the value.

4. Domain Name

A great domain name could be worth as much as anything else you have to offer. Of course, you need to have a really awesome name. The market for domain names has declined from the fervor in the early 2000s, but a solid name still has value.

5. Brand Recognition

If you have been successful in building some recognition for your brand and business that will be worth a lot. If you have done nothing to contribute online and establish your brand in your industry, you likely won’t get much of a bump.

6. Revenue and Financials

As with any business transaction, the value often comes down to your financial statements. That is no different with an online business. Be prepared to show sales data and financials to prospective buyers. Here is a blog post from our friends at Practical Ecommerce that gets more into the financial valuation side of things:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/post/840-eCommerce-Business-Valuation

7. Traffic and Search Placement

A buyer not only wants to understand your current financial position, but they are going to do their best to determine whether a business acquisition is going to grow and prosper in the future. A strong signal (assuming they are wanting to take over your website)  is your site traffic trends. If your traffic is consistently trending upwards, that is an important factor.

Related to your traffic is your current search engine placement for important phrases. If you can show that you have established your website in the search engines, that can be worth quite a bit to a buyer. We all know  that strong organic placement is not an overnight process!

Conclusion

One of the key elements for any successful business is a clearly defined exit strategy. Although it is very hard to determine exactly what someone else might pay for your business, we encourage you to start thinking about the factors we have listed so you have a compelling package to offer when the day comes for you to test the waters with putting your business on the market.

If you have sold or purchased an ecommerce business, I would be quite interested to hear your thoughts.

A frequent question I get from customers is whether their Google Analytics data is skewed by all the traffic their site gets from search engine crawlers. The simple answer is – No. Let me explain in more detail.

Your website receives a barrage of traffic from a multitude of automated programs. The major search engines have crawlers (sometimes called spiders or bots) that systematically and relentlessly visit websites to index pages and gather data for their search engines.

Googlebot and Bingbot are two of the biggies. Our servers get pummeled by scores of other crawlers. The traffic from these crawlers can place a big load on our servers and cause all kind of headaches. But they rarely impact your Analytics data. Why is that?

The reason is  that the Google Analytics tracking is activated by a javascript that is placed on every page of your site. Rarely does a crawler recognize or process the scripts on your pages, so the traffic from these sources – as well as traffic from any other visitors with javascript disabled – will not show up in Google Analytics.

In general it is a good thing that the traffic from automated spiders does not make its way into Google Analytics. Some people argue that Analytics data is inaccurate because ALL traffic from real visitors is not accurately recorded. We will save that topic for another discussion.