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The Content Connection

01 Sep 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With 2 Comments Permalink

The Importance of Product Titles for SEO

Sticky Post By On September 1, 2015 With 2 Comments

Ecommerce websites live and die by their online presence and sales. The marketplace is fierce with new websites cropping up constantly, but it’s also ridiculously vast and can reach customers you’d never dreamed of reaching in the past. These two facts alone make it pretty clear that your ecommerce website must be easy to understand and easy to find – in terms of SEO or search engine optimization.

The world of SEO is constantly changing, but don’t let that scare you away from some of the concrete tactics that will never, EVER change in the world of SEO. One of those vital tactics is creating good, search-friendly product titles. In fact, they’re so important that we’re dedicating an entire article to helping you create the best titles for your products to help you catch the attention of those desirable customers.

Each product on your website should have a unique product title that not only clearly describes that product but uses terms that your customer will use to search for that item. Basically, the days of clever are gone and have been replaced by concise titles. It’s not as much fun for writers, but you’ll definitely appreciate the fact that you can reach a larger audience.

Using concise titles not only helps you reach the audience but it makes it easier for the search spiders to classify your products, making them easier to find and helping them rise in rankings. While some product titles are pretty easy to determine as they’re already created by the manufacturer, others may not be as straightforward. Keyword research can be a wonderful tool to help you gauge what terms are more popular – like blue jeans versus denim pants.

If you have a lot of products and an ever changing inventory, it will help you to create a “formula” for writing product titles that makes the website consistent and easy to follow. Think about something like BRAND – PRODUCT TYPE – COLOR or BRAND – MODEL – SIZE. You may have to come up with several different templates for multiple product lines, but it’ll help keep everything looking great. It’ll also make it easy to navigate and compare. Your writers will appreciate having solid guidelines, too!

Leave out superlative information that may be too “salesy”. Think of your product title as your first impression: you have one line to tell the audience what the product is. People are savvy shoppers these days and gimmicks like “World’s Greatest Product” and “Best…” are just not going to cut it. Remember, be concise and straight forward. That’s what people are looking for.

Finally, if the manufacturer gives you a product title – then use it. All of it. There’s a good chance that the customer is going to be looking for a specific model in many cases, and you want to have that information right up front for them to see. Think about items like electronics – specifically televisions. They come with the Brand name, the Model name, and the Product number. If someone wants model number 1234 they see instantly that that is what you have available for them. If, however, they want the model or brand but aren’t sure which model they prefer, you’re still appealing to them. Side note: product titles and descriptions are very different animals. We’ll discuss this another time, but copying product titles does NOT mean it’s a good idea to copy product descriptions.

Contact Filament if you’d be interested in having us help you create product titles that sell.

26 Aug 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

How to Improve Email Click-Through Rates by Improving User Experience

Sticky Post By On August 26, 2015 With 1 Comment

Nearly everything you do affects your brand’s user experience (UX). From a digital perspective, this includes the consistency of your logos and colors, design aesthetics, ease of navigation, website speed, findability of your products and services, and the consistency of your communication via social media, blogs, email, and however else you regularly communicate with your customers.

That’s right. Communicating with your customers is a key part of user experience. And since email is the marketing tool that gives us the highest return on investment, we can’t afford to skimp on applying UX principles to our email marketing. Working to improve email click-through rates in an on-going process.

On Monday, we discussed employing user experience research strategies to improve conversion rates. We can apply these same research-based strategies to email marketing to increase click-through rates. Since we already discussed them in detail, we won’t go into that here, but in a nutshell, these strategies are the following: listen, observe, dig, learn. Check out Monday’s post for more info.

Once you’ve learned what you can through primary and secondary research, you can hone your email design, content and overall email marketing strategy around your subscribers’ needs and interests to create an email they won’t be able to resist.

Again, we need to keep our customers at the center of our email creation efforts. Every email should have a purpose based on their needs & interests. Thanks to Litmus’s Justine Jordan, we have a helpful list of questions to ask to help us get specific about that purpose:

  • Why are you sending this email? (ex. drive leads, increase brand awareness)
  • Who are you sending it to and what do you know about them?
  • What do you want subscribers to do once they receive the email? (ex. register, download, purchase)
  • How are you going to measure success? (ex. open/click data, number of leads generated)
  • What do you want the subscriber to do? (Is email the best way to communicate your message?)

Once we know the answers to the above, we can move forward creating our email with them in mind. As we do so, here are a few UX-y things to think about:

1. Subject Line & Preheader

First impressions are everything. You have 3–4 seconds to grab your subscribers’ attention with your subject line. With our handy research data at our disposal, we now have a good idea of how to make our subject lines and preheaders irresistible.

We can take a peek back at Peter Morville’s user experience honeycomb for some good guidelines, too. Is our subject line usable? Desirable? Accessible (e.g. can it be read on whatever devices our subscribers are using)? Valuable? Usable? The answers to these questions are all specific to our target audience; therefore, the more we know about them, the better we’re able to hone our message. And don’t forget about your preheader. It’s another great click opportunity.

2. Inside the Email: Content & Visual Structure

We wrote about how to optimize your email body copy for a great user experience a couple of weeks ago. See what we covered here.

You’ll also want to consider the structure, or hierarchy, of the information you’re presenting. Emphasize what’s most important and get rid of the fluff. You can use design elements like color, weight, and size to add emphasis.

A few additional things of note:

  • Credibility comes into play when an email gets opened. You need to ensure you deliver on the expectations you’ve raised with the subject line and preheader text.
  • Be sure to include alt tags for any images since a few email providers don’t support graphics.

3. CTAs

Have you ever received an email in which it’s not immediately obvious what you’re meant to do next? Us too. To avoid that, make it crystal clear what you want subscribers to do once they receive the email with a big, bold, clear call to action.

Credibility becomes important here, too. Be sure you meet any expectation you set up with your CTA by delivering subscribers who click to the appropriate landing page.

4. Segmentation

Know what makes honing your message to specific groups within your target audience easier? You got it. Segmentation. Use the information you gathered from your research to group subscribers into distinct segments, so you can deliver specific, relevant content with language, structure and layout designed especially for them. It’s an effective way to offer subscribers more added value.

5. Mobile Optimization

If subscribers can’t read your emails, they’re not going to have a good experience. First, look at your email analytics. If a large portion of your emails are opened on mobile devices, then you’ll want to optimize your emails for mobile devices. Look too to see which devices are predominantly being used and focus your redesign and testing on those devices.

6. Omnichannel Approach

Consistency becomes key when we’re communicating with our customers across multiple channels. Your subscribers should be able to recognize your emails and your presence on all other platforms immediately. Make sure your emails, website, print materials, etc. all match in look and feel by using consistent logos, colors, and any other brand-specific design properties. Additionally, wherever you link to in your emails, make sure that page is a) relevant to the email you’ve sent and b) mobile optimized. You want to provide a great user experience from start to finish.

7. Frequency

If you’re emailing your subscribers too often, they’re going to have a crummy experience with your brand. Email too little, and they’ll likely forget about you. Find the sweet spot for your specific audience that will keep them engaged without tipping over into bombardment territory.

8. Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3

Test early and test often. What, you might ask, should you test? The options are almost endless. You might start with any of the following: subject line, preheader, creative look & feel, navigation, content layout, imagery, button color, button size, amount of body copy, time of day, day of week, or frequency.

Experience happens. You can either let it happen passively or you can create for it. Get in touch with Filament if you’re ready to take an active approach in communicating consistently with potential customers.

24 Aug 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

3 Steps to Increase Conversion Rates with UX Strategies

Sticky Post By On August 24, 2015 With 1 Comment

Conversion requires that we create an experience that makes a specific behavior (purchases, registrations, donations, downloads, etc.) irresistible. A big part of irresistibility is value—real human value for our customers. Another part is making doing that thing easy.

If we focus on the customer’s experience—and do what we can to create the experience that we want them to have—we have a better chance of increasing conversions. You can check out this Econsultancy article on conversion rate optimization for many examples of user experience (UX) testing improving conversion rates.

What you’ll find there is that 1) content plays a vital role in UX and 2) UX increases conversions. Take the example of ASOS changing a call to action that led to its cart abandonment going down by half. Veem software increased their CTR by 161% by changing a single word. The Heritage Foundation increased its conversion rate by 74% for a 274% increase in revenue by redesigning their page to include a large amount of copy that explained the benefits of donating.

What all these examples have in common is that they focused on user experience by looking into what worked best for their target audience. Marketers and content creators can do that too by employing some UX research strategies.

RESEARCH

User experience is a research-focused discipline that’s focused on discovering and understanding real human needs that can be solved for with a well-designed product. We can apply the same principles to create content that solves for our customers’ needs. UX research often follows a two-pronged approach:

  • Ask customers for their opinions.
  • Watch what they do.

For number one, we can conduct interviews and use questionnaires. For number 2, we need to get in the trenches with our customer’s and observe what problems arise on a daily basis.

Secondarily, we can look at where our customers are going for content and their social sharing habits. What are the social channels and publications they regularly visit? For this secondary research, we’re looking for patterns in behavior. We can use our web analytics. Plus, we can check out their postings and comments in discussion threads to find out what common challenges they’re facing, how they solve problems, topics of interest, how they feel about certain issues and what they’re linking to in support of their opinions.

CREATE

Once you know what your target audience cares about most, you can create an experience with your content. This research can also show you how your content might be used, in what context it’s used, and for what purpose. Then, you can create content for those conditions. Is your customer a busy operations manager who doesn’t have time to read a long whitepaper? Perhaps you’ll want to create short videos to provide the problem-solving content she needs.

A few other tips for content optimization:

  • Remove the clutter.
  • Make it easily discoverable with great SEO.
  • Consider presenting content about how you can help your audience with storytelling techniques. Stories tend to grab—and hold—our attention longer than other kinds of content.

TEST

As we’ve seen above, if we want to increase conversion rates, we need to be sure that our content is generating real value for our customers. A very important part of creating continued value is testing. Our target audience is constantly changing. What worked six months ago may not work today. Seek out customer feedback as often as you can.

Luckily, we can use A/B testing to find out what works and what doesn’t. Begin testing as soon as you can in the development of your site, app, emails, etc. and into the final stages and beyond. Testing on a regular basis is an ongoing process.

In order to deliver the content that people want, or the content that they need to make a purchase decision or the decision to move down the funnel, we need to keep them at the center of our content planning and creation efforts. UX provides some useful strategies for doing just that.

Need helping creating killer content for your target audience? Check out all of Filament’s services to find the right one to help you create content that will solve your customer’s common challenges.

21 Aug 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

Staying On Top Of Your Game: Maintaining Your Social Media Presence

Sticky Post By On August 21, 2015 With 1 Comment

Does your head start to spin when you think about maintaining your social media presence? It can be a little overwhelming to think about, but it’s a lot easier in the long run if you stick to your plan.

When we begin a campaign or start a new social media platform, we generally have a plan in mind (and hopefully, the plan is also somewhere in writing). Whether it’s to build notoriety and establish industry positioning or attract new customers to a particular product, there should be a plan in place to help accomplish the goals and results.

It goes without saying that we have to bring our brand and product information to customers in as many ways as possible. Social media is a great way to spread the word quickly, easily, and to a wide and ever-expanding audience. The only way to keep the attention of our audiences is to make it easy for them to find us, follow us, and continue following us.

We all want more followers and we all want to see our numbers and stats rise throughout the process, but if we focus just on stats, we risk losing focus on the reason we’re in social media to begin with: Our customers.

We know our business, our brand, our products, and our lingo inside and out, but our customers aren’t as interested in the technicalities as we are. Our customers really just want to know what’s in it for them.

For that reason, user experience is gaining as much importance in social media arenas as it has in areas such as content creation and design.

You’ll only maintain a successful social media presence if you prioritize your followers. In other words, you have to feature information that they want – not just what you want to communicate – and you have to provide it in easy-to-use formats.

How? By planning everything around your followers and customers.

Push Their Buttons

Your priority is to feature “Like” “Follow” buttons so people can, well, Like and Follow your brand. But once they’ve Liked and Followed, you have to show them what else they can do now that they’re on your site or at your page.

Provide easily identifiable “Share” buttons in multiple locations throughout your sites so visitors can move from one venue (i.e., your blog) to another (i.e., a social media site where they share your information).

Visitors don’t want to have to hunt all over the place to find where to search for information within your site. Make sure they can find exactly what they need when they need it, and make it easy to save and share the information once they’ve found it.

Be Suggestive

Not only do you want to lead your horses to water, but you want to show them exactly how to drink once they’re there. You have to provide calls to action and next steps at every stage – don’t just assume your visitors are going to take the initiative to do things on their own

•• Suggest that they share your posts.

•• Direct them to sign up for your weekly specials.

•• Show them where they can go for more information.

•• Give them reasons to visit your other sites and/or social media venues both now and on an on-going basis.

Get Picky

O.K., so you know you have to make it easy for people to use your sites and pages, but you also have to cross-promote your various venues to increase traffic and spread the word to potential new followers and customers.

When creating a post, you really need to pick a platform and optimize the post for that platform. Don’t just re-post the same thing over and over.

Re-format posts using different copy and links as needed so that the posts can be viewed and/or related to in that platform. Your Twitter followers don’t want to have to migrate over to Instagram (and possibly deal with signing in separately) to see what you’re linking to in their Twitter feed. Similarly, consider the Facebook user who doesn’t have an Instagram account. Some of them may be able to view your post, but some may not. Those who are unable to go where you’re directing them may become frustrated and leave.

Consider providing options for links to your site or to other social media venues so followers can pick where they want to go. And again, make sure to show them how to get there, and what to do next once they’re there!

Putting your followers and customers first is the key to staying on top of your social media game. By prioritizing your followers, you become a priority to them and that’s always a win/win scenario.

Looking for ways to win big at your social media game? Our team can help!

18 Aug 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With 3 Comments Permalink

Appropriate SEO: Avoiding Keyword Stuffing

Sticky Post By On August 18, 2015 With 3 Comments

Ah, keyword stuffing. It’s the one thing you scold your kids not to do and yet they keep doing it of the SEO world. Whether it’s because they’re way behind the times and don’t know any better or because they just don’t want to listen, there are still websites that practice keyword stuffing to try to get ahead in the SEO game. So let’s start this out by quickly putting any questions to rest and stating most definitively: keyword stuffing is bad. That’s it. There’s no grey area, there are no exceptions, none, nada. Throwing keywords into a page in the hopes of moving up in the Google rankings is a thing of the past – the way back, hot tub time machine past.

Once upon a time keywords held all the power. If your website sold Flibbertigibbets you needed to have that keyword on your website or the Google bots had no way of knowing what your website was selling and how to categorize you. (We’ll come back to this). So when the SEO world learned of this they applied the old “more is better” adage and began stuffing that website so full of keywords that some of them were impossible to read and actually worthless to the visitor. Some even used keywords in the background in the same color as the page so they human eye didn’t see them but the bots did. And with this a new way to scam people and direct them to worthless, fraudulent and even hazardous websites was born. Now you can see why keyword stuffing quickly became a horrible thing and the scourge of the legitimate SEO world.

So let’s go back to that idea of search engines categorizing you and keywords. Clearly not all keywords are bad and you still need to have legitimate, well researched and useful ones to help your website reach the target audience. Because keyword stuffing became such a horrible tactic, websites that used this approach were often banned and some people started to have an irrational fear of legitimate keyword usage. This unreasoned fear can also have a negative impact on your website because if you do not let it be known that you sell Flibbertigibbets no one will ever find you.

Unfortunately there is no magic number of times or percentage of times you should be using a keyword. Sometimes it flows more easily and naturally in your content and you can work that word or phrase in more often. Other times it’s harder to do. The important takeaway here, other than to never use keyword stuffing as a strategy, is to do your homework and select appropriate keywords that resonate with your particular audience and then use them in a logical way that is informative and enlightening without being forced or contrived.

If you’re looking for ways to craft compelling content for your website with keywords that are researched and selected by SEO specialists, contact Filament. We’d be glad to help.

12 Aug 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

User Experience & Character Count: The Happy Medium

Sticky Post By On August 12, 2015 With 1 Comment

We all know by now that it’s key to create a seamless user experience everywhere our customers interact with us. Email is an integral part of that experience, not only because it can get you higher conversions. (More on UX and conversions in a couple weeks.)

With content, and especially text, we have to walk a fine line between getting our message out there, communicating everything we want to say, and not overloading our subscribers with content. We want to make sure that your marketing emails aren’t so long that they’ll lose readers’ interest but not so short that they feel like it wasn’t worth their time to open it. How do we balance optimal character count based on UX research with having enough content to spell out that super-long, multi-tiered promo or to convey our brand in just the right way?

And which strategy is better? Sticking strictly to recommended character counts or busting out of the confines to say everything you want to say? As with so much of email, it depends. You need to find a balance and strategy that works for your audience. That said, we’ve put together some guidelines to give to a place to start creating your company’s email content best practices as it concerns length and character count.

Subject lines & preheaders

Since subscribers only spend about 3–4 seconds determining whether or not they’re going to open your email, you need to grab their attention and interest immediately. That means you have to write for your subscribers. Your subscribers, aka “users,” want to share, interact and engage with your email content. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have subscribed to your emails, right? Make sure you give them plenty of reasons not to unsubscribe or send you straight to their junk mail.

We’ve written before about character count, subject lines and preheaders for mobile devices. You can read about that in this helpful chart that gives you specific numbers for different email clients. Generally, you have about 40 characters for subject lines and 100 characters for preheaders. That doesn’t mean you need to use all of those characters. Short, punchy subject lines can be very effective.

Body copy

We read recently that the average email user spends an average of 51 seconds reading each email they get, so know that you don’t have much time to get your message across. Keep it under 750 words broken up into short blocks of text containing 100–200 words. Use headlines, subheads and bullets to make the copy scannable. You can effectively divide big blocks of text with images, too.

You’ll also want to keep your email copy within a certain width. Having the right amount of characters on each line is key to readability. If your lines are too wide, readers will have a hard time focusing on the text. If they’re too short, it tends to add stress to the reading experience. According to typographical research, the optimal number of characters per line is around 55 to 75.

Choosing the right email design approach for your subscribers is key to delivering usable, useful content. You can choose from responsive, fluid and scalable/aware design depending on your audience and how many of them are opening your emails on mobile devices. You should also consider your business goals and available resources when making design choices. Mobile copy should be in a single column. You have more flexibility with your email design for desktop. We’ve seen plenty of multi-column layouts do well there.

Are a lot of your subscribers opening your emails in Gmail? If so, know that Gmail has a 102KB email size limit—just the HTML, not including images. Emails that go over 102kb will be clipped, cutting off the bottom of the message.

In addition, whitespace is key to creating a great user experience. It gives your readers’ eyes time to rest. And it’s been shown to increase users’ comprehension.

CTAs

Make your email actionable in any environment—mobile, webmail and desktop. Character count for your CTAs depends on your touch targets. Apple recommends making touch targets at least 44 pixels square. You want to make your calls to action big enough for large thumbs to tap easily.

Find the Sweet Spot with A/B Testing.

As we hinted earlier, all of the above depends largely on your target audience. Test, test and test again to learn what works best for them. You can A/B test character counts for subject lines, preheaders, CTAs and body copy; whitespace in relation to copy; using images to break up text; overall email length; copy width; and more.

The subscriber journey doesn’t begin and end with your email. Once you get a subscriber to interact with your email, you need to make sure you follow through with the promise of your CTA by providing value with your landing page. Do everything you can to make your buyer’s journey a pleasant one from first contact to conversion to advocacy.

Get in touch with Filament to learn how to give your customers a great experience from start to finish.

10 Aug 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 3 Comments Permalink

Content + User Experience = Win!

Sticky Post By On August 10, 2015 With 3 Comments

Lately we’ve been seeing a move to dethrone content and establish user experience (UX) as the new king in digital marketing. There are those who aver that content is simply a part of user experience and others who staunchly insist that content still reigns. Has content been subsumed by UX? Or does content power the overall user experience? Is this even a meaningful debate?

We think not. Because content is key to user experience and vice versa. If you want to build your business online, you need to make them work hand in hand in order to move your prospects through the stages of the buyer’s journey.

The content marketing world has changed. We can no longer rely exclusively on valuable content creation and distribution. Digital usability and interactivity, among other things, are now important factors when it comes to inbound marketing. But no one’s going to build a successful business and brand without engaging content. Part of creating a great experience with your business—the experiences you’re providing for visitors on your site, followers on social media and the experience with your business overall—is in providing great content to be enjoyed by your target audience.

To quote a Content Marketing Institute article about content planning and UX research, “content marketing is all about putting buyers first.” Brands put buyers first by providing them with the info they need to make a purchasing decision. Likewise, UX is all about putting users first—by designing experiences, products and services that help them accomplish their desired tasks and goals. This process includes taking into consideration people’s unique needs and removing barriers to engagement.

Instead of treating content as part of user experience, let them work side by side to give your customers the help they need to move further down the sales funnel. Information architect Peter Morville suggests we “strike a unique balance on each project between business goals and context, user needs and behavior, and content.” He created the model below, known as the User Experience Honeycomb, with UX specifically in mind, but we can apply it to content as well. It can be a useful tool for consciously defining priorities based on your business goals, users and content.

UX Honeycomb

User needs and behavior can help drive your content creation in valuable ways. Are your users looking for a social experience? A way to interact, share and connect? Then, package your content as a social experience. Do your users respond more to a story? Then, tell a story. How do you know what your customers want? Start by creating buyer personas.

How do we make content and user experience work together? Create a content strategy. That is, a business-driven, user-focused plan for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable—and findable, desirable, credible, accessible, valuable—content that meets specific goals. If you’re creating content for customers and prospects, their experience through all stages of the sales funnel needs to be at the heart of your content strategy.

Looking to create a great user experience for your customers across all channels? Contact Filament for help devising a content strategy with user experience at its core and creating useful, usable content.

07 Aug 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With 3 Comments Permalink

Social Media User Experience: How People Follow Your Brand

Sticky Post By On August 7, 2015 With 3 Comments

We’re talking a lot about User Experience (“UX”) this month. You can Google “User Experience” and find a thousand different articles on the topic, but we’re going to focus on social media user experience as it directly relates to customers’ interactions with a company.

Oh, and if you don’t mind, because people – rather than acronyms – are the core of this conversation, we’re going to refer to “people” – our “clients” and “customers”. In social media terms, we “Like” to refer to them as “fans,” “friends,” and “followers”.

As you know, everything from your website to your email campaigns, customer service to sales promotions, external signage to in-store displays, and every single communication in between, impacts a customer’s experience with your company.

We’re always hearing about new research indicating when we should post, how we should interact with our followers, and even which social media avenues are the best places to focus our attention. No matter what, we all question how often we should post to maximize the impact our social marketing has on our customers.

But, as Marketing Profs puts it:

“…converting social media fans requires more than constant sharing;

it requires understanding the ways they interact and build relationships.”

We all have our “extrovert” followers. Those amazing cheerleaders that never miss a post and share our brand’s news with all the excitement that we hoped it would muster. If we post a question, they’re there to comment on it. We can always count on the fact that they’ll Like our stuff. We love them and the enthusiasm they help bring to our brand.

Our biggest fans are a special breed. We know how they respond to us. We know how they interact with us. We know that they like our brand and our products and services because they tell us they do with their Likes and comments and rave reviews.

But they are just the tip of the iceberg.

If we market just to our more outspoken followers, we may not be connecting with up to 90% or more of our less active, but equally as important, social followers.

Image source: Nielsen Norman Group

Image source: Nielsen Norman Group

So, what about our more “introverted” fans and followers – the people we rarely, if ever, hear from beyond their initial Like or follow? How do you know if you’re reaching them? How do you know what gets their attention?

By thinking the way they do rather than from your marketing perspective. By connecting with them in ways that are important to them, which is typically in a more personal manner.

Not everyone responds to the “bandwagon” approach. Some people – let’s call them social wallflowers – prefer to participate passively. They may not be giving brands a virtual thumbs-up every time a post crosses their feed, but they’re still getting the messages.

And because they’re getting the messages, they’re showing up at your door to buy what you’re selling – even if they’re not publicizing it.

Social media is an all-important avenue, but make sure to provide more than one way to follow your brand for those who will be responding in different ways. Offers and information provided via mobile, email, snail mail, and in-store promotion all have to connect with your social media messaging in order for them to work. Each call to action (“CTA”) should also have more than one option so people can act on it in the manner that’s most convenient for them. The more convenient you make it for people to connect with – and respond to – your brand, the more they’ll do so!

It definitely takes some strategic planning and even more strategic quantifying, but personalizing your messaging to address how people follow your brand is the single smartest marketing communication maneuver you can make. Remember, it’s not about you!

Wondering how you can make your marketing efforts more effective by making it more about your customers? We can help!

04 Aug 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With 1 Comment Permalink

User Experience-Driven On-Page SEO (SEO That Doesn’t Sound Like a Robot)

Sticky Post By On August 4, 2015 With 1 Comment

When you run across an old website that was written in the early days of SEO, it looks and feels incredibly outdated and a little ridiculous. The days of packing keyword on top of keyword to get the most impact are certainly over and they actually didn’t last as long as most websites seemed to believe they did. This change is a very good thing.

What we’re talking about here is on-page SEO which is very closely tied to the user experience. This is also the place where a split is beginning to form in the old world of SEO.

At Filament we always recommend having a solid search engine optimized foundation, and we will always stress the importance of researched keywords, images, meta data, titles, etc. Your website back end needs to be strong, well-thought out and designed to draw your target audience. This is the “traditional” SEO but the field is constantly evolving and it’s the on-page SEO that is seeing the most change.

Let’s think about those old websites. Even the good ones replaced every pronoun with a keyword and were written in a very repetitive, robot-like manner. While you got the information you wanted and actually learned to ignore the bad writing, it was awkward and largely un-enjoyable. The modern SEO approach has moved leaps and bounds from those days and now focuses on the user experience.

To get the most from your new, user experience SEO model you need to turn to the user. Gathering search metrics from your website is the first step and can give you scads of valuable information about what people like, what they return to, and what they shy away from.

The next step is to actually communicate with the user. This can be accomplished in many different ways with anything from surveys to in-depth focus groups. But it is through this open dialogue that you can gather some of the most insightful data.

While compiling data and learning more about your user is vital, it’s completely useless unless you implement some changes. Google now “rewards” SEO plans that improve user experience and inspire interaction. Whether you accomplish this through something simple like removing awkward keyword stuffing or something more involved like an active social media presence, a little extra effort will help you reap the rewards.

Great on-page SEO begins with a conversation that continues between you and your audience, and a conversation goes back and forth with you doing your part to keep it going.

If you’re looking for ways to begin – and build upon – those user conversations, Filament can help!

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