Of all of the elements that are required to be in place for a website to serve its purpose, there is one above all, that has to have a clear and present place. It needs to be prominent, attracting to the eye, and clear in its message, because you only get a fraction of the time you have in other advertising markets to make your mark.

Unlike radio, where you have a captive audience, and unlike newspapers where you have a subscribed, reliable audience in the manner of subscription service, your online marketing efforts have the be razor sharp. Today we had a discussion with the encompassing message being to hone your call to action. If you are in the business of sales online, make sure to have a badge showing as much, if you need newsletter sign ups, make sure it is clear and evident on the page what you’re looking for. Because unlike radio, newspapers and television, you have somewhere between 3 and 8 seconds to capture your audience before they click that back button and they never see your site again.

As much as I’ve used and seen the web these last 5 years working with Fresh, I still don’t see it quite the same way as the boss. Often times I need to repeat to myself that same mantra of keep it simple, keep it simple, and while I have few issues with it now, early days I would complicate things too much. Even after staring at a clients site and trying to help them work out a stronger call to action/higher rate of conversion it was (unsurprisingly) the mentor who finally just told him if you want to make more sales, show you’re having a sale. Successful ecommerce sites plaster the front page and landing pages with keywords yes, but also the most important stop words. Stop words are terms which don’t make search engines take notice, but your visitors. He doesn’t like to admit that he’s a salesman, but he can definitely sell, and made the point that people buy benefits more than they buy an item. Extended warranties, free shipping, no taxes, reduced price, all direct benefits to the consumer. And all strong stop words to keep visitors on your site and punching that purchase button over and over again.

In the last week or so we have had the Super Bowl & the blackout, Tiger & Phil winning their first tournaments of the year in great style and of course the usual gibberish around the Winnipeg Internet industry.

As most of you will know, occasionally I like to have a rant, today is the day

Having been around the net now as a marketer for 17 years, I have seen a lot come and go, Google came, AltaVista went, Facebook came and Friends United you get the gist, it’s no different in Winnipeg.

I have seen companies and individuals start in Winnipeg, then go, but they always seem to turn up again like bad pennies as some other company or expert consultant usually in Social Media, SEO or Marketing and it gets very tiring, I cannot believe that Winnipeg businesses keep falling for it.

One year there in college or shelf filling at Walmart, waiting in restaurants or selling flowers, the next there experts online peddling webinars or circuit speakers, really, do real people fall for this BS, In Winnipeg Yes.

People who know me or have dealt with my company know I don’t beat about the bush, I say things as they are, yes the truth hurts sometimes folks, my only concern is my client and the well being of there business and online return on investment.

I don’t care too much about money, it’s not our companies driving force, doing the job well and the client making money usually brings its rewards, enough to pay the wages and rent anyways.

We have friends in the city and probably a lot more enemies, mainly due to me speaking my mind, apologies to my sales manager, but how long can this charade go on for?

We have never really advertised ourselves too much, not joined the numerous clubs or groups in the city, done speeches even when asked or webinars for that matter, why, we never had to and to be fair I would probably struggle to get through it without a F word being thrown in there. I did join the Chamber for a few years after being asked, which did nothing at all for my company, maybe I faces just did not fit.

The truth of the matter is we had it all online, Yes the internet where 92% of people look before buying anything, and so as the old saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So straight from the horse’s mouth are the reasons you could be missing out on all those top spots on Google, Bing & Yahoo not to mention the thousands of $$$$$ people are looking to spend on your products.

There’s a reason why we are the #1 Online Branding Company in Canada on Google, Bing & Yahoo.

There’s a reason why we have dominated local search in Winnipeg over the last 6 years for SEO, Social Media & Internet Marketing.

There’s a reason why we are #1 Online for Winnipeg Digital Media.

There’s a reason why we are #1 for Winnipeg Ecommerce in Canada Online.

There’s a reason we have a 99% renewal rate from clients.

There’s a reason why we have continued to grow and lasted more than 15 years online.

There’s a reason Google purchased one of our companies.

We could give you another 100 reasons why we are leaders online, but we would rather you hear that from others.

Can you think of a reason why you should not be working with us?

Give your company a reason to shout out to the world, Call us today for FREE Quote.

“It’s not bragging if you can back it up” Muhammad Ali

RECENT SUCCESSES
Fresh Traffic was voted every month in 2012 as a leading SEO Company in Canada by independent pier’s at Top SEO’s.
Fresh delivered over 60 million visitors to Manitoba websites in 2012.
Fresh has opened a new ground floor reception at 201 Portage Avenue

You Really Should Get on Board.

Since you have your website built and online, you’ve added some great content and attached some analytics to monitor your traffic. You’ll start to notice a term in the layout that often gets more read into it than it really means – bounce rate.

Your websites bounce rate isn’t a mystery, all of the answers as to why people would leave your website are right in front of you, on your website. Where the confusion sometimes comes from is when users start to confuse the terms bounce rate and exit rate, as they’re not the same thing. WOrking with the definition of bounce rate from Wikipedia:

It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

Then, compare this to the base meaning of exit rate:

represents the percentage of visitors to a site who actively click away to a different site from a specific page

and you can see why they might get confused as they seem the same on the surface.

To begin with bounce rates, there is no such definitive value with which to balance your websites individual bounce rate. If you have a website built to sell running shoes for example, customers in search of loafers who searched for comfortable shoes will likely “bounce” off of your site once they see a front page full of cross trainers. With your analytics installed on your website, the only real clue and method to deduce why your bounce rate may be at a given level, is to go through your keyword breakdown, and see if there is a discrepancy there. If you find that you’re listing for terms which don’t entirely match with the goal of your site, you’ll experience a bounce rate roughly equal to the ratio of unrelated terms.

The exit rate from your website, may not in fact be a bad thing, depending of course on the aim of your website. If you act as a referral site for example, and you have a high exit rate to the sales or sign up site, then you’ve served your purpose. If you’re concerned that your bounce rate seems to be higher than you believe it should be, examine your content, and examine your message. All of the answers are there for the picking, you just need to take the time to work out the kinks.

When you’re busy at your computer, or even just taking some downtime and cruising around on Facebook connecting with your friends and family, have you ever wondered how the one of the two largest online properties continue to operate? They offer their services for free access, and you don’t even need to sign up to use it, at least in Googles case. If you’ve found that when you think about it, you really don’t know where their money comes from, you’re not alone.

In a survey conducted in August of last year it turns out that just over a third of internet users out there believe that search engines sell their data to marketers. Another third thought that maybe other companies pay annual dues to use those websites and even 20% of respondents thought that the sites offered premium features. While Google is somewhat transparent about how they make their dough, adwords and ad placements via adsense, Facebook is still working on fleshing out a clear revenue model. They have ads that are on every sidebar and profile page on the site, but with metrics showing that interaction on those ads being rather low, and with costs still high, it hadn’t fleshed out as reliable as of yet. At least in Googles court they’re not selling your information to marketers, still haven’t seen a clear answer from the Facebook side of the web however.

It’s been a number of years now, I think most who work full time on the web have stopped counting, but Google is the dominant force in the search world. Globally rocking somewhere around an 80% share with desktop users and where mobile is concerned, there really isn’t anyone else in the game. It’s no wonder that with the way the last year has gone with Panda/Penguin updates that some businesses have found themselves floundering, as it looks like they put all of their eggs into one, big, Google basket. Most analytic software can tell you where your traffic came from, whether it be Google, Bing, Facebook, or even from a referral link of sorts from a community driven site like Reddit. Using that information you can build a chart of sorts to get an idea of where your traffic is coming from. It’s likely you’ll find that a high percentage of your traffic, 65% and up does indeed come from Google, but if it starts getting higher than that you need to take a look at your website, and about diversifying your online position. In an ideal world, you’ll be getting almost an equal share of traffic from different sites, with Google making up the largest portion of the pie, say 50% or so, and the rest from other online sources. Because just like those who found themselves at the mercy of Panda and Penguin, if you’re relying too heavily on Google traffic, you’ll be in the dumps if you break any rules.

While you can’t make everyone happy all of the time, you can make most of your customers/clients happy most of the time, one of you will make a mistake and ultimately someone will leave with bad feelings. There are a number of things you can do in this situation when you’ve been on the receiving end of a bad review. Here’s a tip: throwing a fit is the wrong answer.

1) Try talking to the complainant
If everything worked in a perfect world, then you would never have any bad reviews or unhappy customers ever, but sorry to say, it will happen eventually. In almost every case where an author of a bad review was asked why they chose to write it, it was after they tried contacting, or dealing with the company directly. The black mark only came to exist once those avenues were exhausted, so if you have someone on the phone with a complaint, or someone at your door with a grievance, it’s in your businesses best interest to deal with it as quickly and promptly as possible.

2) Sleep on it
If you’ve managed to miss the window of opportunity to deal with the customer before they air their dirty laundry on the internet, the best thing you can do for yourself, and for your business is to do nothing. At least at first, once you read or hear of a scathing review, it’s human nature to want to lash out to protect yourself and your interests. It’s a normal response and one that you don’t need to fret about having, but it’s the wrong response. In the online world of word of mouth, those who fire the first shot often win. Consumers usually side with the reviewer, who is often perceived as the “nothing-to-gain” victim facing a profit-focused business owner. While consumers expect local businesses to show a more personal side in how they speak with customers, there is little sympathy for defensive and unprofessional responses. So sleep on the review, send the author an email or private message if possible, and attempt to correct what ever the issue was. You may find that by taking the time to calmly address the complaint, that the review becomes modified to reflect your attempts at correction, or even disappears altogether.

3) Wait and see
If you’ve attempted to correct the issue with the services provided which made your customer/client so upset, and had no success, the next available action for you to resort to is to wait and see what the public does. Community review sites like Yelp, allow businesses to post their own version of events relating to a review, so it gives you a window of opportunity to share your side of the story. Because every business has had one of them: that obnoxious customer who wouldn’t be satisfied no matter what your recourse. As a respondent online to a bad review, you won’t win any friends or arguments by slinging insults back and forth at each other.

4) Encouragement
Once that bad review has been written, all avenues exhausted for reconciliation, and the bad press is still there, you do have an option to deal with the situation. You could bury it. You don’t physically bury it of course, but you make it a point to your customers that have positive experiences to post to the same review site, as well as others, to speak of their encounter with your business. It won’t happen initially, but over time the good will steadily drown out the bad, until it’s finally, entirely buried.

With the vast majority of the world becoming more and more digital and available online, there is so much opportunity for business growth and expansion that it’s almost dizzying. There are new areas of customers, there is no open or close time as your site can be online and selling your products or services for you 24/7. Internet marketing and proper online branding can place you and your business in the position to experience massive growth in business and in connections, all the way from the local sector to the global one.

But there is also the other side of the coin, the flip side of the web and it can be a terrible place. Not referencing black hat SEO or any of the under handed tricks that can be used to rank highly or do shady business. I’m speaking about online reviews, and online reputation management – they say that bad news travels faster than good, and that goes ten fold online.

Any business, especially the smaller local ones face high stakes when it comes to online reviews and their online reputation. According to a study conducted last year, approximately 72% of consumers surveyed said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 52% said that positive online reviews make them more likely to use a local business. Yelp is one the more well known services which feature reviews of businesses, and businesses are beginning to encourage their visitors to use the service to rate them by offering prizes to verified posters. So where is the driving force behind that decision? A Harvard study conducted in 2011 found that a one-star increase among Yelp reviews of Seattle restaurants led to 5-9% growth in revenue.

Hitting a little closer to home, it was nearly a disastrous year downtown for some businesses as they were built and improved up around the newly returned Winnipeg Jets franchise to town. When the league was locked out and there was no hockey going on, those businesses began to falter. For any one of them to receive a bad review due to poor food, service, attitude, or what have you, it will be the death of their business. Negative reviews can happen, will happen, as not everyone is happy 100% of the time, but there are correct ways to respond, and incorrect ways. We’ll begin to cover that ground tomorrow, as it’s not a short topic.

The decision was handed out yesterday from the FTC with Google versus everyone else basically, and while some people were happy with the decision, others obviously were not. In case you’ve missed any of the news surrounding the case, the very basic gist of what the complaint was that Google was controlling their monopoly of online search and marketing using anti-competitive practices.

There were a couple of good points made in the ruling, the main point being that a monopoly in a given market is not, by itself, illegal. In order to make a monopoly illegal, you need to gain, or maintain that hold using anti-competitive practices. This has been a long ongoing case in which the FTC poured over 9 million pages of documents after the charges were initially laid. And after all of that work, all of the discussions and meetings – Google has not violated any U.S. antitrust law.

It’s no real surprise that Google would be the target of such a case, they’re supremely dominant in the search industry. The Mountain View based giant accounted for 74.5% of all U.S. search advertising revenues in 2012. Microsoft on the other hand took in a significantly smaller share at 8% in the past year. The argument has long been that Google has been demoting or removing it’s rivals in their results pages in order to drive users to their own properties. And yet, after an investigation that nearly lasted for two years, and after what FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz described as “an incredibly thorough and careful investigation,” the FTC concluded unanimously that the evidence was lacking to charge Google.

While Google is going to make some changes in the way they do business, they’ve been cleared of any wrong doing where search is concerned, as it turns out they’re just better at it than the other options. From Ryan Radia, associate director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

America’s antitrust laws are designed not to punish companies for growing too big or too unpopular, but to ensure no company stifles competition itself… The thriving Internet sector — a bright spot in America’s otherwise lackluster economy — shows no signs of suffering from too little competition.

As always at this time of year we give our predictions for SEO for the following year, this year we have gathered some help from our friends & other search experts in the field who have given there twist on things to come.

In 2013, the SEO Role must go above and beyond. For example, a basic SEO strategy would obviously include some amount of reporting (for keyword rankings and traffic numbers at the least); however, I find myself analyzing the data to help my client better understand their demographic. Where are visitors accessing the site from, when do they access the site, and what are they specifically looking for when they are on the site?
All of these questions—and more—are in hopes of helping them identify new ways to effectively reach their customer base and ultimately make them more successful. It is SEO’s job to provide meaningful help.

Rand says links and rankings are just means to an end, not the end itself.

What clients really want is not better rankings and more links; they want to make more money.

The SEOs who understood and understand where Google is going and what their clients really want are the ones who are still in business and doing well. For them, the job of a SEO is content relevancy (public relations), user experience, web design, conversions, traffic segmentation, call tracking, research, writing, and anything else that sells products and services and leads to more profits for the client not just short-term, but long-term as well.

Most of all, the job of an SEO is to see the future. Those who can’t will go out of business and take their clients with them.

In conclusion, each of these experts—coming from multiple perspectives–agree that SEO will become a much broader and more complex function in 2013. Yet it will also become more vital than ever before, as it converges with every variety of online presence and marketing.

SEO 2013 predictions

A topic that we have touched upon a number of times on the blog here is the discussion of skill sets. There is no all in one tool box when it comes to being a successful company online, you need to make sure to put the right tools in place. You should have your content and all of its creation, that is usually down to the business owner or visionary offering the services. You then need sales people, or if you are not into sales, a work force devoted to spreading your information, both on and offline. When you do have a website, you need to have a web team in place to manage your site, and finally online marketing. You need to have a dedicated team or individual in place who can manage your online branding efforts.

Being that we are an online focused company, we tend to see some prime examples of either one of two extremes. Either we have a client who decided that they could handle everything in house, and quickly learned that online management is a full time job in itself. The other side of the coin we find are others in our space, web designers or developers who try and sell themselves off as SEOs as well. When we have a new client who has come to us because they have learned they can’t manage the workload on their own, it is a great day. Primarily for them, for as long as they haven’t broken any of the rules, we can assist with their positioning easily.

An unfortunate thorn in our side however, are the individuals out there who bill themselves as a one stop shop for all things online. Cumulatively at Fresh, we have somewhere north of 40 years of experience in the online market, ranging from development, design, and optimization. We have always billed ourselves as online branding and internet marketing experts, but we can help you out if you need a new website designed and developed as well. And when it comes down to it, everyone within Fresh does the job they’re best at. A designer to design the sites, a developer to make them light and quick. One person taking care of the on site and on page work and the boss taking care of the finished product. If he finds a change that needs to be made, whether it’s in design, development or with the on site optimization, it gets sent back to be addressed before it goes live.

The idiom “horses for courses” is a phrase I came to know well working here at Fresh, basically meaning is what suits one person may not suit another. But it is that stringent starting point that has allowed us to provide our clients with the results they deserve and demand, both with their website and their online marketing efforts. 2012 will very soon be behind us, we will be ready come 2013 for you and your business, to help you succeed.

There’s a lot of noise being made lately from the Bing side of the web about how Google isn’t playing by the good old search rules and they’ve coined their term ‘Scrooogled’. I find the term a bit of comedy, as Scroogle used to be an anonymous way to search via Google by blocking cookies and not using log files, but instead of focusing on a service that no longer exists I had a read of Bings press release on the matter.

The title: “Don’t get Scroogled: Bing Launches Campaign for Honest Search..” I shortened it a bit as it’s rather long, but it sounds like they want to help search engine users find relevant results. It didn’t take long for Bing to get into the numbers of things, a projected $96 billion in online shopping this year, but perhaps a little generous when saying half of that comes from search engines. That number is likely lower than that, but, let’s disregard that for the moment – most online shoppers use a site like Amazon to find their deals online. It didn’t take very long for Bing to start comparing apples to oranges though, because very quickly in their blog posting they talk about how the Google Shopping results are based partially on paid inclusion – much like you would do with running an profitable Adwords campaign. For those who have never seen the admin side of the Adwords platform, once you’ve set your bid and ad, Google gives you a projection of where they think you’ll place within the results. They’re by no means set in stone and change day to day based on bid, competition on your terms, and so on.

Why I use the apples to oranges comparison however is because Bing is comparing search results, to shopping results, and saying that Bing is playing by the “old search rules” where Google Shopping is not. you can’t really compare Bing web search to Google Shopping search, as it would be like comparing Google web search to Amazon shopping search, they serve different functions and as a result, function completely different. In May of this year Google Commerce published a blog describing how the change to the shopping side of their product was going to begin to use a paid metric to help build on the relevance of the results, because a retailer wouldn’t pay for an ad to list a fake product. It is like advertising using billboards or radio ads to try and reach more consumers, it’s just another marketing medium to get your product out there. So to skip ahead just a little, Bing is comparing their organic web search, to Google’s Shopping search results – an apples to oranges comparison.

In the interest of fairness, I decided to have a look at the Bing shopping results, versus the Google shopping results. Being that we’re now comparing apples to apples, if there is a disparity it shouldn’t be too difficult to spot. I searched for the likeliest top sellers for the holiday shopping season, and was surprised at every turn. Not by the results that Google served me, but by the lack of results Bing returned. Each results page was sorted by relevance, and I’ll just let the screenshots speak for themselves.