Make sure you don’t loose sales from these situations:

Personalised searches

In Dec 09 Google introduced personalised search which examines your search history and ‘adjusts’ your search results accordingly. Read more here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

Are you really ranking that well ?

While the concept of personalised search sounds great, there are a couple of pitfalls you should be aware of.

To explain lets say you’ve been monitoring your website ranking by occasionally searching for it. Google’s personalised search will kick in and display your site  with a higher rank, but just for you. Meanwhile everyone else including your prospective clients will see (or may not see) the site in its real ranking position which may be way down the list and out of sight  :(

In your personalised search induced naivety you’ll believe your site is doing real well, but actually it might be doing really, really bad!

A suggested solution
If you do monitor your site’s ranking, (and I commend you for doing this!) then use your browsers ‘stealth mode’ to check rankings  and see what the rest of the internet sees.

Most browsers have a stealth mode but it can be a bit hard to find so here’s some clues:

• Internet Explorer 8 calls it ‘In private Filtering’ Ctrl Shift F
• FireFox calls it ‘Private Browsing’ Ctrl Shift P
• Chrome calls it ‘Incognito’ Ctrl Shift N
• Safari calls it ‘Private Browsing’

How much does Google know about you?
The other way that your search results might differ from what your clients see, is when you are signed into your Google ID.
Google may  skew results based on info stored  in your Google ID.

The solution here is to log out of your Google ID, or again use your browser’s stealth mode.

Invisible Flash

Apple iPhones and iPads are becoming increasingly popular internet devices. Sites I monitor have up to 6% of visitors arriving on their iPhones and I suspect iPad usage will explode soon to take this total number much higher.

Flash is used to provide visual interest in websites, and is important for emotional based sales i.e. selling products and services that make us feel good. Flash is also good at attracting attention.

As any iDevice devotee will tell you, iPhones & iPads don’t display Adobe Flash.

Any Flash in your website looks like a gapping black hole to these visitors. There’s no emotional sales value, it looks ugly; even defiled and predictably undermines your website’s ability to engage iDevice visitors .

Read what Apple has to say about Flash and why they are unlikely to ever support it.  http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

What does this mean for your business website?
David Radzikiewicz from A7 Designs suggests, split your web presence over two sites; your traditional site and then a mobile visitor site. Visitors are automatically sent to the best site for their internet device by coding in the site.

If your target market is likely to visit using an iDevice then take action soon.

Display Standards

The last and ongoing display anomaly relates to web design standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a set of technical standards for websites to ensure they all display OK, but many  sites don’t comply.

Display compatibility is complex as your website must be displayed faithfully in the plethora of browsers each with multiple software versions. As context; in the last 30 days, 52 different browsers/browser versions visited just one clients’ site.

This is has been further exacerbated by browsers that didn’t comply with the W3C standards (Microsoft being one of the worst offenders), and as a result W3C has lost relevance for some frustrated Web Developers.

Who cares about standards, I just want sales!
Fortunately there are typically few display issues for non-compliant websites, but occasionally the outcomes can be catastrophic sales-wise:

• Menus don’t work properly, so the visitor can’t access product information or sales pages.
• Product information is displayed completely off the screen and unable to be read.
• Search engine spiders are unable to navigate the site, so products don’t feature in search results.
• Text and/or images are displayed over the top of other content making it impossible to read

These are all excellent sales preventers and something I’m sure you dont want in your site.

Is my site W3C compliant ?
Fortunately W3C has an easy to use validation tool that you can check each page in your website for compliance. http://validator.w3.org/

I suggest you discuss any W3C errors your find with your Web Dev as some are trivial and might cost you a lot to achieve very little.

http://www.browsershots.org/ is also an excellent free resource to see how your site looks in a wide range of other browsers.  It also interesting just see see how many there are out there…

Where to from here

• Monitor the traffic in your site
  I strongly recommend Google Analytics. Its free and world class.
• Use Analytics to check your website’s visitor clickstreams to see if they are doing what you want them to do. If not, take action.
• Use Analytics to identify then check correct display for the more popular browsers used to access your site.
• Check the main pages in your site for W3C compliance

Summary

Dont assume that everyone sees the same as you online. Your Clients may have a very difference experience, and its their reality that determines your online sales success.

This blog is based on the Succinct Update newsletter from July 2010.
You can subscribe directly to our newsletter here

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It will be interesting to see what happens

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The Conversion Optimizer is one of a series of excellent tools built into AdWords that it seems many people dont realize exist.

Google says

Analysis indicates that, on average, those of you who use Conversion Optimizer experience a 21% increase in conversions along with a 14% decrease in CPA.*

This analysis compares the performance of Conversion Optimizer campaigns over the course of a year with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimizer. The actual impact will vary from campaign to campaign.

Not bad for a free tool! Read more

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Just in case you might be thinking that the “non-rich Snippets” are somhow economically disadvantaged or low fat versions of a snippet, think again. A Snippet is a portion of  the Search Engine Result  (SERP) This is the bit about your site that Google displays in search results    - read SERP background here

Here’s an example of rich snippets from  the WebMasters Blog article. Rich Snippets contain “value added information” in the SERP such as an image, company name,  location, even survey results etc

Google have declared these  (initial) categories as candidates for Rich Snippets:

• People profiles
• Reviews
• Videos
• Events
• Recipes

Before you starting thinking that adding a recipe picture wont help you sell more from your website think again!
SERPs are an important if not vital part of the organic search sales process, and being able to differentiate your SERP above your online competitors WILL command attention, visitors and most likely sales…

What is interesting is that Rich Snippets don’t just happen spontaneously. They are triggered by the presence of  ’rich  information’ that needs to be coded into your HTML using special HTML coding extensions either: microdata, microformats or RDFa

Adding these is yet another job for overwhelmed web developers who already have too much to deal with and increasing range of detail and sophistication now expected to be in a modern website.

Anyway, watch this space as I can see that Rich Snippets will potentially be applied to a broader range of categories so if/when these become relevant to your business (if not already!)  then jump on it promptly before your competitors do!

It might even be astute to pre-code Rich Snippets into your site…

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Matthew Carter has written this nice review of these features over at the Affilorama blog

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Its 5 years ago that Google acquired Urchin & so Analytics was ‘born’

Read more on the Analytics blog

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Here’s what the blog looks like on my iPhone

Nice work guys!

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Very useful data if you are trying to win some business online.

The new capabilities exposes more data about the terms (ie keywords), the rank and even the pages that did rank. All essential diagnostic data for this type of analysis.

What is even better about this enhancement is the data is presented in Analytics style charts with great drill down capability building into the UI

Nice work Google WebMasters Tools, and all the more reason you should be using this amazing tool to diagnose your business website’s organic search performance

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The Google Maps LBC displays appropriately located businesses in response to searches with a geographic context, but only if they had an LBC registration! Read more here

One aspect of specifying your business in Google Maps was that businesses (particularly small businesses) may not necessarily want to advertise their base location as it may not be relevant to where or how they provide their services.

Google Maps has responded with an update that enables the ‘business location’ to now not be displayed while also adding a ‘service area’ as either:

• A radial distance from one location or
• A services are areas served

If you’re not using Google Maps as part of your online advertising then you are definitely missing out!

Cheers
Pete

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As reported by SmartCompany, DealsDirect got blacklisted by Google after being hit by malware embedded in their online advertising.

Does anyone know where the ads came from?
I’d hope that someone hasn’t been loading malware payloads into AdWords ads…

Cheers
Pete

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