The other night I was scanning my television over for a holiday movie other than “A Christmas Story” (Don’t get me wrong, I love this movie, but 24 hours is overkill).  I stopped at the AMC channel to find “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, a bona fide classic, and before the movie commenced, a brand new campaign for Nicorette Gum flashed across the screen.  The commercial itself was concise in its delivery and ended with what will most certainly be their new slogan: “Quitting Smoking Sucks. A Lot.  Make Quitting Suck Less With Nicorette.”  Complete with a “Suck-O-Meter” to gauge how much quitting smoking sucks, the commercial was overtly engaging in its simplicity and design.  Their classic slogan from before, “Nicorette, Nicorette, you can beat the cigarette”, came across as a melody you could repeat over and over and that was just it.  Maybe both slogans work in tandem and you may see nothing wrong with either, but for my money, their new slogan is more effective.

Simplistic advertising is slowly becoming a new fad, sort of like Vans and Umbro shorts in the 90’s.  This simplicity has captured not just my mind, but a majority of consumers who start with either liking the commercial’s quirkiness or seriousness before even considering the product.  With a decision reached, the product slowly transitions into the slogan as the commercial continues to pop up over time.  It doesn’t even have to be a subtle commercial.  A webpage with an inherent theme against the background coupled with a short, snappy slogan will really connect with the consumer and can increase the number of visits made to that webpage.

 Once you find a subtle catchphrase to promote your product, your next step is to use subtle tones with the construction of your webpage.  Make your slogan stand out by making it abnormally larger than the product information sections.  You must give them an eye-popping reason to scroll up and down your webpage and that begins and ends with your slogan.  Even if that includes turning your slogan into a flash player-induced icon salsa dancing across the screen, it’s a method that warrants attention nonetheless.

Just over a week ago Verizon Blackberry users discovered a slight change in their default search browser, losing the quick buttons for Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and others for the singular, shiny and new (to them) “Bing” option. It remains to be seen whether the rumored exchange of a cool $500 mill. from Microsoft to Verizon is worth the customer outrage, but hey, that’s… business?

Further rumored details are that this is part of a five-year exclusivity plan, so Verizon smart-phone users may not be seeing the end of this anytime soon. The question for us cool SEO kids is, as always, “How does this affect me?” Though this isn’t the point of my question, if you’re a Verizon user, then you have to actually type in Google to get there, losing seconds of precious time EVERY time. Oh noes! Personally, I use T-Mobile, primarily because I was led to believe Catherine Zeta-Jones visits your house… *ahem* and I’m still waiting. But I digress…

The thing is, this is still too new to see what impact it will have on the search engine arms race. Verizon’s the big dog here in the U.S., but will Bing gain much market share with this move – will we start to see it in our Pay Per Click budgets? Is Bing looking ahead to try and bully into the future smart phone search market? Or, what seems to be most likely at the moment, will “google” remain the most searched term in Bing’s search engine?

Optimizing your website to make the most of it takes continual work and modifications, but the benefits are well worth it. By changing something simple like the color of a button you could increase the revenue your site makes by 2% or more. Now 2% doesn’t sound like a jaw dropping amount but if you’re company has a $100,000 monthly sales thats an extra $24,000 in your pocket each year. And if you’re OverStock.com changing the location of a button up their conversion by 5% keeping with the same theoretical numbers for the imaginary company above that slight change adds $60,000 in revenue for a seemingly insignificant adjustment. These increases can be dramatic or slight but is a must for sustainable business practice. Your website works around the clock rain or shine, never calls in sick or complains and works to make you money.

I would recommend looking at a current site revamp if your traffic isn’t doing anything on your site yet. But if you have decent amount of leads maybe shift right into the minor changes. But if you do a whole site redesign let the site run for 6-8 months depending on traffic rates. After you have a nice benchmark start modifying the location slightly of your weekly sale, change type size, colors, navigation location (and keep it well within the sites look you don’t want to do a massive change to close to each other) but here is where the testing comes into play. Change something small, the size of the navigation font and run it for a few months and if it helps leave it, if it hurts change it back and move onto something else. Slowing adding 1-2% conversion every few months with four or five of these within a year you’ll jump your sales 10%.

Lets see how we can increase your numbers today.

“The Science of Managing Search Ads” was a recent article on The New York Times online that profiled the online retailer, Tiny Prints. Tiny Prints is a greeting card company that faired extremely well on Cyber Monday (the online equivalent of Black Friday), with customers buying at twice the rate of last year. With web traffic up and sales pouring in, the CEO made a risky decision in an attempt to garner more profit. He choose to scale back on the Google search ads, or Pay Per Click ads, that helped direct this influx of traffic to their storefront.

This risk did not pay off.  As Tiny Prints scaled back their paid advertisements, their competitors seemed to increase their focus.  Sales began to drop and their traffic began to decrease. Tiny Prints realized they made a poor decision and reversed their efforts. It took the company more than a day to recover the lost traffic and to increase sales. A day that during this peek holiday season they couldn’t afford to lose.

Paid search works. And it works particularly well for events like a peak holiday season. While we may be too late for this holiday rush, what about Valentine’s Day or Groundhog Day or some other day?

While it’s true that people like to root for the underdog, they don’t always like to buy from him. The small retailer is often seen in this light. Groups like the 3/50 project and here locally, BuildKansasCity.org are doing a great job at prompting us to shop local, eat local and spend local. But what about online? How do the independent retailers compete with the elephant in the room Big Box stores?

Most will start a website and upload photos of their product and hope for the best. These seem like simple checklist action items, right? OK, let’s see…business cards? Check. Bags? Check. Website? Check. Alright, done. I am ready to sit back and watch the money pour in.

Not exactly. Your site needs to be so much more than just a page or two thrown online to “validate” you as a business. Think of your website as an extension of your brick and mortar store. And for some customers who aren’t local, this is your storefront, this is all they know about you. Wouldn’t you want to drive customers to a site that not only looks great but converts into actual money being made?

Let’s talk about it.

In my recent email marketing research, I stumbled upon a group that’s trying to change the way email clients (ie Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook) display HTML emails. It’s a huge undertaking that requires everyone to work together to create a set of web standards that email designers can work with.

Currently, those designers are forced to use ‘90s technologies to create the attention-grabbing emails we all know and love, but they are also forced to deal with 12+ different email clients that all display their lovely message differently. As one of these designers, it’s hard not to pull my hair out every time I layout an email.

The Email Standards Project is still in its infancy and needs people to spread the word about web standards. Their mission is “…that some time in the future web designers will be able to rely on a solid, consistent level of web standards support when designing and building HTML emails.” On their site, http://www.email-standards.org/, you can view screen shots from every major email client to see exactly how different the same HTML email is displayed, and why, in our tech-heavy society, this is such an important thing to fix.

The Email Standards Project may not be saving children in the Sudan, however it’s trying to make the online world a nicer place to design for and interact with. Please pass their website on to other designers or email connoisseurs that would be interested in a standard future.

It’s shocked me to see the number of people still using tables to lay out their websites… Tables pose a problem for many reasons.

1. Website Speed

2. Cost

3. Compliance to ADA standards

WEBSITE SPEED
Why does speed play a part in this new world of 20mb internet speeds and fiber-optics infrastructure? Because not everyone has it! Websites still need to keep an eye on 56K dialup, as a majority of users have DSL+, there are a significant number of people who don’t have access to anything faster. Rural areas, which you might not consider too far off the beaten path, relay on glorified cell phone towers to get 128K speeds but it’s unreliable and works on direct line of site, leaving standard dial-up as the most viable alternative.

Google now takes your pages’ sizes and load times into consideration when placing you on the search results. And tables, great for tabular data is heavy on the code side, which increases the file size and load times. When designing a website each page needs to be below 150k before CSS, Images, and other attachments.

The speed is also affected by slicing your site into different images to be placed inside each cell. A browser will load one large image faster than 40 smaller images, and it loads all at once instead of populating one at a time making your site look like its having problems while it finishes the remaining images.

COST
You’ve defined the cell sizes, so when it’s loading your site isn’t jumping around like Richard Simons as it pulls in the files one-by-one, but lets talk cost. If your website has 50 pages, all built using your “template”

design, then what happens when you want to change your website using CSS? A simple update can be performed in one location, then tested and implemented in a matter of minutes. If you’re using tables, that same job just got amplified 50-times. When one simple change has to be manually pushed through each page again, one-by-one, that becomes costly and burdensome, and that’s when you begin to avoid changes. This, in turn, hurts your site’s ranking, which hurts your traffic, which hurts your sales… not a good thing.

Compliance
Any company with 15 or more employees is required by law to meet the ADA’s standards for website design, which means not using tables for website layout.

I took this quote from the government guidelines: “Large tables of data can be difficult to interpret if a person is using a non-visual means of accessing the web. Users of screen readers can easily get ‘lost’ inside a table because it may be impossible to associate a particular cell that a screen reader is reading with the corresponding column headings and row names.”

-http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm#%28a%29

What does this all mean for you? If you’re larger or smaller than 15 employees it’s in your best interest for all the reasons above to start removing tables from your site’s layout.

As the newest member of the Adcuda team, I have been learning by leaps and bounds how important email marketing and campaigning is. For my first entry, I’d like to showcase just how significant a well-timed, well-designed email can be, from my own personal experience.

Before I came to Adcuda, I worked in a well-known Big Box store that specializes in home décor and gifts, as well as wine and food. Being a fan of the merchandise before I was hired, I had signed up for the store’s ‘Membership Program’ wherein I receive about two emails a month. These emails, always bold and colorfully designed, also offer an in-store deal, if not a printable coupon. Having learned this, I would click-through to the website every single time.

After I was hired as a cashier at this Big Box, I saw the magnitude of the membership email conversion. A day after a membership email, almost every single customer coming through my line would hand me either a coupon printed directly from their email or a basket bursting with the in-store specials mentioned in the email.

Now this is all fine and wonderful for the Big Box, but how can an occasional email improve your own company’s customer conversion rates? Let them understand what you can offer them (and this doesn’t need to be a coupon). If they’ve signed up for your newsletter, they’ve already expressed their interest in your company. Let them know they made the right decision by sending them – occasional – emails, which are bold and to the point. Large photos and headlines followed by short explanations and lots of links to your homepage will show the customer you value their limited time, and encourage them to browse at their convenience.

Once you’ve sent your email, sit back and watch the click-throughs climb. Not only will business boom; you’ll have a firm base of consistent customers.

National De-Lurking Day is coming up next month! Don’t celebrate it?! Think it might be akin to Festivus or some greeting card company generated day of fake joy?

Sorry. Nope, but I’ll send a card if it helps Hallmark start following our progress. It’s a celebration of the community spirit of blogs and social media as a whole. It’s fantastic that your blog shares valuable information and that people walk away with a great idea, but how often do you get the chance to dialogue with your readers?

We talk to our clients about how helpful blogs can be to build your brand and increase your SEO all day long, but what we don’t do often enough is reach out to those blogs. We are guilty of lurking ourselves. We rarely stop by and introduce ourselves.

Let’s start talking to one another. See that comment button up there? Push it and introduce yourself. What’s your name, what do you do, how did you find us, do you prefer ketchup or mustard?  And then leave us a link to your blog and insist that we continue the dialogue in your space as well.

Ok?

Ok.

Back in September we talked about how the simple act of claiming your Google Local Business page would give you a small boost in your Google 10-pack ranking, which, as we covered, translates directly to fame, fortune and the domination of all who oppose you. Well, should you want to buttress this newfound popularity a bit let’s cover another factor in this land of Local Search Visibility: the volume of your customer reviews.

That’s right, it’s not good enough to just claim the thing and leave it by its lonesome, now you have to actually nurture it. Let’s think about what it will take to get your customers to bother actually going all the way to your listing, and then having to type words… “Ugh, I didn’t expect homework, I just wanted to buy a pair of shoes!” See, this imaginary person I just made up doesn’t even want to do any of that!

How about if we incentivize this whole thing for them? Maybe a 5-10% discount on their next purchase? Maybe you run a competition for a month or three where a random commenter wins a prize? You could even incorporate a video into the listing (yet another boost in the Google 10-Pack – ho-ho!) where you pick a name from a hat, throw a dart at a wall of names, see which bowl the neighborhood cat eats from, however it is you decide to divine your winner. Make it fun, make people want to go and at least check it out, and make it fun for you, or whichever lackey you put on it, to actually do it.

Local Search can be a boon to businesses of any size, all it takes is a bit of attention and maybe just a bit of imagination.