1. Bad copy

Poorly written English will annoy users. That’s all you need to know. Make sure that your copy satisfies the basics of grammar, punctuation, web conventions for scannability. After this, next level content should be on-point with your brand message and adequately convey the message to your target audience. A great idea is to hire a professional copywriter to do a content audit and make recommendations.

2. There’s too much going on

Back in the wild west of the internet 1.0 there was a lot of bad websites that heaved with flash animation, videos that opened automatically, poor colour choices and poor design. This is the number one no-no. Having a website that appears busy will obfuscate the intention and core message of the website and cause the site visitor to rapidly lose interest and click the back button.

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3. The site is retro-central

A dated website communicates that the site owner hasn’t made and effort to get with the times. It speaks volumes and all of the messages are pretty negative from a user’s perspective. The message conveyed is that the site’s owner is careless, apathetic or stuck in the early 00′s. Steer clear of 2004  drop shadows and flash animation. As a rule, update the design on your site to reflect technological and aesthetic developments every 2-3 years.

4. Too much movement

Movement on the site caused by automatically starting videos, pop-up ads, gifs and flash animation will repel users. It’s a dream for marketers and a nightmare for the casual website visitor. Make sure that you respect people giving you their attention, don’t abuse this attention.

5. Not responsive

A website should ideally look similar on a tablet, smartphone device or desktop PC. It should also look great on all browsers. Failure to account for these differences in the development phase will alienate users.

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6. Silly Typography

Typography is important. Although if you go too wild with it, the results can be patchy, dull or unreadable. It’s important to get the right mix in terms of matching type that contrast well, in the right size and colour. The two most important factors are readablity and aesthetic appeal.

7. Ads appearing out of nowhere

It’s not very nice when ads suddenly appear on a site. This can change from minor irritation to a silent vow to ‘never again return to that stupid site’ – if you have ads that can’t be closed or obscured and have to run their course.

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8. No social proof

It will instil greater trust from users if you include testimonials, customer reviews or ratings on your site. On e-commerce sites, high ratings for product reviews from genuine people will shift more product. Although as a caveat, don’t include fake testimonials that are written poorly by Joe Bloggs down the road. People are smart enough to spot fake testimonials a mile off.

9. No pictures or personalisation

This is a mistake as most people do want to put a face to the name. This makes the site more friendly and roots it in the real world. Similarly, if you don’t include an About Us page then you are missing an important opportunity to tell people what you are about.

10. No contact details

Include both a landline, a mobile, email and possibly a residential address for an office, or failing that a PO BOX. Hunting around for a business’s contact details gets boring pretty quickly for users. They will go elsewhere.

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11. Hidden or confusing shipping information

Don’t muck around with shipping information and costs mid-way through the check out process.  This is a sure-fire way to ensure that your abandonment rates are through the roof. Instead make it clear right from the beginning, the options for shipping, cost and estimated time-frames.

12. Too many sharing buttons

Putting twenty sharing buttons underneath a post may seem like it provides more opportunity for shares. In reality the opposite is true. It reeks of desperation. Keep it to five at a maximum.

There are countless other bad ju-ju ways to mess up your online presence. Although we don’t want to scare the bejeezus out of you. Instead for loads more helpful advice and affordable marketing and web design support, speak with Leon Fernandes and his team today.

In this article we will be considering each stage individually and gaining some insights into how to formulate a kick ass content marketing strategy that will blow your competition out of the water. Buckle up, here we go.

Analysis

The questions you should be asking are…

• What is my audience doing on site?
• And what are they (and my potential audience) doing off-site?

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On-site and off-site analytics

At this point you should do some analytics. Although don’t get too granular and bogged down in detail. Look at your own analytics and wider web based analytics. Look at what drives social shares, links and traffic to certain pages on the site.

Organic traffic: Take a look at what keywords in the past few years have driven organic traffic to your site. This is a good way to gage the relevance of keywords for future articles. Here are a couple of content tools to help you.

Competitor analysis: Check out how your competitors fare in the content stakes. Look on SEOMOZ for tools on domain authority and inbound links. Check them out on social media to see how many connections they have and how frequently they post.

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Taxonomy and Audit

Taxonomy is another word for information architecture. This is what drives how easily people find your content. It’s really crucial that you nail this down.

Category flash cards: Put the titles of your published articles onto flash cards on a table. Then sort these titles into particular groups or categories. This will allow you to ponder the categories and work out which ones have been given the most emphasis.

Tagging audit: Some CMS have too much flexibility with tagging. This means that you could end up with potentially hundreds of tags used only once that are redundant. This leads to unnecessary doubling up on tags and therefore duplicating pages under different categories.

Menu restructure: After auditing and sorting out categories and tags with an audit, it becomes easier to build hierarchical menus that allows people to find content easier.

Evergreen content audit

Evergreen content has a long shelf life. This is the best kind of content, as it never dates and can be wheeled out for many different future scenarios. It can also be altered to suit the changing needs of a client. So it’s content gold really. See if you can spruce up evergreen content for re-use in a different channel or context.

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Retrospective editing

Take the time to look over really popular content from the past. See if you can improve it with editing or doing a follow up that will drive traffic and engagement.

Content Creation

Stock and Flow

These are two different types of content.

Stock: The solid, meaty, interesting and relevant content created by a content team. This is evergreen content that will build up a solid fan base in the months or years to come.

Flow: News items or a steady flow of pertinent information from partner or industry websites that  is relevant to your audience but isn’t authored by the content team. It could be in the form of tweets or pictures, videos and so on.

Page Types: Develop custom pages in WordPress using the Advanced Custom Fields option. This allows you to create different page formats to serve different purposes such as for product reviews, blog posts or feature articles.

Editorial calendar: Allocate your stock and flow content to various content writers in a calendar.  Your weapon of choice could be Google spreadsheet or Excel.

Content KPIs/Benchmarks

• Pageviews of content
• Average time on page
• Social shares
• Links built
• Words published per day (2,000 -3,000 is a good enough rule for maintaining a decent level of quality balance)

Headlines: These account for 80% of click through rates. So don’t rely on instinct for headlines. There should be some science behind it. Read the guide to writing headlines here.

Formatting: Conform to web conventions for content. Important elements such as writing content in bite-sized chunks for ease of scanning; the use of numbered and bullet point lists and so on.

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Distribution

This is all about being seen in the big wide world. This is a combination of link-building for SEO and online PR for your content through social media.

Distributable content: Ensure that you have enough high quality content. Blog posts and product pages are a dime a dozen. Instead think of infographics, videos, photo journals and long-form writing.  Include this in the planning phase.

Social media: Consider creating several different social media accounts and drip feeding relevant information into these instead of doing an open slather on one account. This will avoid social media fragmentation.

Email marketing: Ensure that straight off the bat you define the stage of the buyer cycle that the recipient is in. Give your newsletter a purpose don’t simply just sell products.

Partner networks: Build up mutually beneficial partner networks where other parties will post your content and you will post theirs. This sort of relationship of trust builds over time and involves some nurturing, although it can be very beneficial.

Speak with Leon and his team about content marketing, strategy, branding and web design services today!

Consumers need to identify with the brand, and empathise with its mission statement. When you have a website designed and developed to establish an online presence, part of successfully integrating it into your business is ensuring that it’s aligned to the key messages behind your brand.

If your business is a not for profit foundation that supports ill children in hospitals, then your website will need to have a design which reflects key messages like care, compassion, hope and family support.

Everything from the tone of the content to the colours and page categories of the website will determine if your target audiences can see what you see, and feel what you feel.

If the content was riddled with sophisticated business speak, how many parents or family members will bother to engage it and seek out your services for supporting ill children?

If the colours and images are not family friendly or capturing in any way, how in the world will you convince families to look at your charitable offerings as a means of help?

Brand alignment matters when it comes to having a website, because streamlining key messages with your online space will drive home the overall mission statement, and define your business or organisation as a pivotal opportunity not to be missed.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a corporate organisation or an NFP, brand alignment is essential to harnessing the true power of online marketing.

Other than social networking between internet surfers, Social Media networks have developed unique facilities and modules to have a stake in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) streams:

• Facebook has its “Facebook Page” that allows for businesses to set up a forum and identity (branding components include top banner, image, Facebook Ads and so on)
• Twitter has its accounts for businesses to create real-time tweets and attach links (there is also a recently developed component to allow for paid posts to appear in other account feeds)
• LinkedIn has its professional-only pages, as well as industry groups and advertisements

The playing field now hosts a whole new ball game, and businesses both large and small are doing what they can to connect to their consumers. Generating conversation among consumers is a very cost-effective strategy which circulates a brand.

The double-edged nature of this opportunity is that the company will not have control over what is said about its brand’s integrity and reputation. For example, in March 2011, the international car manufacturer Chrysler had one of its Social Media coordinators accidentally post a comment on its Twitter account (@ChryslerAutos) incorporating the F-Word:

“I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f*ing drive.”

The comment was deleted almost instantly. However, re-tweets went off the scale exposing this comment to millions of Twitter users, and public anger was the subsequent result.

Social Media has untapped potential for businesses to communicate with consumer markets, but great care needs to be put into the social media strategy.

Daily users make up the majority of internet traffic worldwide; browsers and surfers that have different needs and different ways of conducting online searches.

When a business decides to get a website and hire the services of a web company, there is a strong chance that usability might not be fully integrated into the site design.

Hyperlinks

Say you have basic hyperlinks on your business website that are there to redirect users to other sections or pages. You’d want them to be visible and situated in an area where the user would have a high chance of seeing it and clicking on it.

Having small hyperlinks does not take into account a user’s hand movement when engaged with the mouse. It is far easier for a user to both see an appropriate sized hyperlink, and drag the mouse onto its surface area.

Contact

Ask yourself this question: “Is it important that website visitors have my business contact details?”

Answer’s pretty obvious right? Amazingly, many websites do not have contact details immediately available, or positioned in appropriate areas to accommodate the user. Engagement is essential to developing any potential sales and conversion rates with site visitors, and contact detail location can make or break the end result. A professional web design agency will ensure your contact details are strongly visible and accessible.

Search functions

It is common for web surfers and net-wandering consumers to visit a business’ website and look for a search tab (often found at a top corner of the screen). Search functions give these site visitors the chance to find what they need far more efficiently.

And if a website doesn’t have a search function? Well then, there goes its chance to strengthen conversion potential!

Many users are search-influenced. Google and Yahoo do not make the majority of their business off pay per click advertising; they are the world’s leading search engines!

People are constantly searching for what they need, and the same practice applies to business website search functions. Specific product and service search is undisputed as a means of attracting potential consumers and getting them over the line to buy your offerings.