At a search engine marketing conference, several of us gave a session on website usability topics ranging from usability and SEO to site architecture and requirements gathering. Afterward, there was time for questions by the audience. Someone asked, “Why don’t we all just copy Amazon.com?” I replied, “Never, ever copy what Amazon does.” The audience responded with surprise, thinking I was not a fan of Amazon.

Not true. The reason you don’t want to copy a successful site like Amazon is that their website requirements are not likely to be the same as your site requirements. Their users may have different characteristics than your site visitors. Their customers’ needs may be completely different. You don’t have the user, traffic analysis and usability testing data they’ve collected over the years that they use as a base for their user interface, information architecture and content delivery.

Your website is unique

Today, with blog templates or content management system software being the design foundation for many sites, web page layouts are fairly consistent and come with no surprises. We’ll find two or three columns, a header, footer, sidebar navigation and a picture or two. The logo typically goes into the top upper left corner. It would be unusual to find a page beginning with a copyright year, privacy policy and company address. Arriving to a solo column page with no header would be odd.

One wonders what creativity we’ve lost out on because we’re afraid to change the status quo. Usability folks like to promote consistency and user habits for design considerations. This is because anytime we are forced to re-learn where items are customarily placed, it slows us down. There is a risk of user confusion. We’re told that it takes only a few seconds to lose your visitor, so why take any chances?

Many web designers have been creating product navigation menus the way Amazon has been doing it, believing that if Amazon’s way is making them a profit, it ought to do the same for their sites too. Why wouldn’t this work?

Understanding mental models

Amazon has expert knowledge of their customers’ mental model. This means they know how their visitors search and browse their site. They know what their users want to find, or learn, before they add an item to the cart. They know how what words are chosen most often to locate certain products, so their information architects can then create their entire information architecture based on user language, keyword choices, and traffic patterns.

When someone says they will make your website easier to use, ask them what mental model they are referring to. Are they going to make it easier for search engines to crawl and rank it? This is a searcher mental model and one an SEO is more likely to be focused on. An information architect wants to know the mental model of your target users. What are your customer needs? What types of behaviors can you expect from them? Many websites have different user paths on one website.

For example, colleges provide different types of information for students, parents, alumni, staff and teachers. Each type of person has a different mental model, with their own needs and expectations. A common mistake is to design identical user paths for everyone, ignoring the specific financial, emotional and practical needs of each user group. Remember that your website is unique. The better you understand what motivates and interests your site visitors, the more competitive your site will be.

Findability and manageability

Information architecture supports findability and usability. It can also support organic SEO practices related to on-page content and word usage. One area that Amazon has helped to pioneer is user management of information. Their customers are recognized by the use of cookies and purchase history. There are different user types for them to track. Some people are affiliates. Some arrive for the first time because they received a gift certificate. Others are regular customers, so Amazon has a chance to study the kinds of products they like. Amazon users can manage their own wish lists, accounts, leave book reviews, send gifts and follow author blogs. Do you know your site visitors this well?

Information architects use terms such as taxonomies and semantics to help describe what they do. Simply put, they organize categories of information into something that makes logical sense. A usability oriented person is interested in the same thing because words can create momentum or promote frustration.

For example, which one of these category links is the best choice to find online specials?

• Closeout Sale
• Gift Ideas
• International
• New Releases
• Top Sellers
• Today’s Sales

What if your customer wants to find sales or new releases by product category? Can they tell, by looking at these links, if they can sort by price? What types of products does this site offer? There are no clues offered in these link labels. By “today”, when is the cut-off time? What does “international” mean?

Interestingly, the website that uses these category links has all of its customer service information at the very bottom of the homepage, lumped into a box as if an afterthought. What message does this send to customers? Was any user testing performed? Apparently not. However, there was attention put on the searcher mental model as far as search engine queries go. Unfortunately, the site owner learned that search results did not equal conversions. In their case, they required both a rebuilt information architecture as well as usability adjustments to increase and support conversions.

A 360 degree team effort

Your website is and should be the manifestation of your own vision. Sure, it’s fun and helpful to study other websites. But those sites should inspire you to try new ideas or even have the courage to think outside the box. Surround yourself with those who have the technical skills to implement your vision. These people will be your project managers, search engine marketers, social media marketers, information architects, usability and user experience consultants, web designers and developers. Ask them questions about where they acquire their inspiration. Test site designs on people. Research, with and without search engines, the language and terms your site visitors use to find your products or services. Be sure to write out your specific site requirements and business goals. Write guidelines to be sure everyone on your team sticks to the game plan.

And know that nobody understands your customers better than you do. Not even Amazon.

–Kim Krause Berg

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Right now, somewhere, a potential customer is searching for your products. But, who will they find first – your company or your competitors? Search engine marketing is all about getting in front of prospects at the moment they are searching for your capabilities on Google.

But how do you take full advantage of search engine marketing and outshine your competition? The following tips will put you on the path to search engine marketing success.

Choose the Best Keyword Phrases
The most critical step in search engine marketing is selecting the most important keyword phrases for your company. If you do not perform this step properly, your search engine marketing campaign is destined for failure.

When choosing the best keywords, it is critical to choose phrases that are relevant to your business and searched most often by your customers. Begin by getting inside the heads of your customers and brainstorm about potential terms your customers use when thinking about your products. Ask your salespeople, customer service people and best customers what phrases they think are most important. Then, turn to keyword research tools like Wordtracker or Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool to create a list of highly searched terms that will drive targeted traffic to your Web site.

Make Your Web site Attractive to Google
Now that we know your most important keywords, let’s put them to work. You need to make sure your Web site content and coding is optimized to take advantage of these phrases. Begin with your Web site copy – the information people can read on your site. Make sure you skillfully write your copy to effectively market your company, while using your important keywords in a relevant fashion.

Next, focus on your Web site structure – the code under the hood of your Web site that search engines see when they visit. Use your keyword phrases in page title tags, heading tags, director names, file names, alt tags and meta tags. Please note: while the ‘keywords’ meta tag is no longer relevant, the ‘description’ meta tag is very important. This description will show up in the search results below your link, providing a great opportunity to entice the searcher to visit your Web site.

Attract Quality Links to Your Web site
Link building involves gaining links to your Web site from other relevant and popular Web sites. The more quality inbound links you have, the more popular your Web site is in the eyes of Google. And, these links can have a dramatic effect on your search ranking.

A good place to start is to make your Web site content link-worthy. Good content attracts links, so fill your Web site with enlightening content such as best practices articles or a blog about trends in your industry. Next, get your Web site listed in online directories. Look first to important directories within your industry. Then, focus on general purpose directories like Business.com. You can also garner links from vendors, business partners and trade associations. Finally, leverage online public relations and distribute press releases and articles online. By consistently applying these link building strategies, you will dramatically boost your link popularity and your ranking on Google.

Run a Results-focus Paid Search Campaign
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) in the sponsored links section of the search results offers a compelling ROI-driven marketing opportunity. Unlike traditional advertising, where you ‘pay for exposure’ regardless of the results, with PPC you are not paying to be listed in the search results. You only pay if someone clicks on your ad and visits your Web site, providing a compelling ‘pay for performance’ mode of advertising. To manage an ROI-driven PPC campaign, first, bid on the most relevant keywords. Don’t pick terms based on popularity. Make sure your offering will be of interest to the searcher. Second, tie your bidding strategy to results. Think cost-per-lead and cost-per-sale, instead of just cost-per-click. Finally, include a compelling ‘call to action’ in the ad and send traffic to a relevant landing page tied to the ad. A compelling and relevant offer will help lift response and boost your ROI.

Measure Your Search Engine Marketing Success
As with all marketing activities, you must measure success to judge your past performance, as well as identify strategies to improve your results in the future. Since search engine marketing is all about attracting targeted traffic, begin by leveraging Web analytics to monitor traffic increases from search, as well as the phrases peoples are using to visit your Web site.

To make sure the volume of visitors continues to increase, you should also monitor your ranking in the search results. On a regular basis, check your position in the search engines for your keyword phrases to see that you are trending toward a top 10 ranking. Finally, to measure success of your PPC advertising efforts, harness the measurable nature of the Web to track the cost-per-visit, cost-per-lead, and cost-per-sale for your PPC ads.

–Bob DeStefano

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Building a loyal, satisfied customer base is paramount to any Web site owner or company. Every business owner wants to know what his or her customers are thinking and why they make certain decisions. Most understand that the most effective way to listen to customers is to collect their feedback. But even so, challenges remain: How should they collect the feedback? Where does it all go? What should they do with all the information collected? And most importantly, how do you show your customers that you are acting on their feedback, and in real-time?

Customer satisfaction and loyalty start with listening. Listening and engaging directly with your customers is critical to service, support and brand loyalty. Chances are your customers want to engage with you, but on their own time. Companies can offer multiple forms of contact, live chat and public support forums, but often it can be difficult to respond directly to each customer in a personalized way. You can provide a deeper level of customer service by opening up the channels of communication online.

Eliciting feedback lets businesses tap directly into the minds of customers to improve their Web sites, products or offerings. There are feedback tools and Web analytics platforms that provide you with the “who, what, when and where,” but you are still left guessing about the “why.” Understanding the elusive “why” behind customer behavior is only the first step. The most important step is what you do once you learn why, and how you engage and respond with your customers in real-time.

Before you implement a customer feedback initiative, your first step should be to evaluate your own goals and understand what it is you want to do with your customers. How will you acquire and act on customer feedback? What feedback will you receive? What will you do with the feedback? Once you establish your feedback goals, you can determine how to integrate customer feedback into your daily processes.

Choosing the right tool to organize and manage your feedback is dependent on these goals. Customer feedback can help you increase satisfaction, loyalty, retention and conversion rates so Web site owners should not overlook or invest in improper feedback tools. What tools are available and for whom are they best suited? You may have shopped around, or even experimented with a feedback tool or survey.

With many companies’ longstanding reliance on traditional outreach tools, it’s tempting to gravitate towards those surveys and polls, or even refer to each of these unique approaches as “surveys.” Yet, each accomplishes a different end. Understanding these nuanced differences allows owners the flexibility to implement a tool that produces the feedback they need.

Surveys come in a variety of formats, including e-mail surveys, online pop-ups, survey landing pages and more. Surveys and polls provide a high-level understanding of what is happening on your site, and are based on pre-set questions with a statistical review of answers. You receive answers to the questions you create.

You can use surveys and polls to ask ‘site-level’ questions such as: ”Where did you hear about our site?” “What are you looking for?” “Who are you?” The answers to these questions can help you to know your users better, but they will not provide quantitative information on why your customers behave they way they do on your Web site. In addition, your survey and polling data is ultimately reviewed from a statistical analysis view, which may cause the solution to be relevant mainly to large Web sites with a lot of traffic or to a specific group of your customers. This means that not all types of businesses can benefit equally from these tools.

What is important to remember is that you are trying to elicit honest, timely and unique user feedback. Providing an online customer feedback mechanism is one way to open up a managed channel of communications. A feedback button should be visible all the time on each of the site elements you would like to monitor. This will provide you with process-level and Web-site-level high-quality (i.e., specific comments) and actionable data, allowing you to read and manage feedback, as well as respond to users. When visitors or customers come across an issue, they simply click on the feedback icon. Customers then rate their overall impression of your site from a selection of emoticons; select their issue category from a graphical menu; and provide a brief synopsis, giving you insight into their behavior in that instance.

Providing the online feedback channel in critical areas of your site also helps offer a less intrusive user experience and greatly increases the chances a user will give you his or her opinion. When you place a customized feedback form in a certain process in your Web site, such as a shopping cart or checkout area, you can gain critical information about why your users are leaving these areas. Once users provide feedback, you can personally respond and let them know your company cares about their experiences and is available to help. As the feedback form is customized to the specific Web site process, users will be more open to talk with you as you are directly responding to the thoughts they had when they left feedback on your Web site.

Using an online feedback mechanism lets you prioritize your collection efforts so you can choose to actively ask your users to submit feedback in the locations in which you need it the most, using a pop-up mechanism (you might want to use this option in your site’s shopping carts process, for instance, or on your product information process). The ability to choose the location as well as the frequency of this pop-up makes this a non-intrusive approach.

You can manage and analyze your user feedback based on your site preferences, Web analytics or CRM data, to provide a more complete view of your customers. In addition, you can control the look and feel of the feedback form to match your brand and further encourage users to engage with you at this feedback level. After you receive the feedback, you can choose to respond directly to your customers and talk with them about their feedback. This helps to put a human face to your business, as often your customers are skeptical about customer service. Using this approach not only lets you personally respond to a large number of users, but you also can improve your operations and back-office processes based on the trending feedback responses.

Regardless of what you use, the most important aspect of customer engagement is to first listen – really listen –and second, to respond and interact with customers in a timely manner. Too often, companies implement a survey or provide opportunities for customers to offer praise, criticism and feedback, and then the engagement ends. Nothing can hurt your company more than asking your customers for their opinion and then going silent. It’s what you do with the feedback that will show your customers how serious you are about real engagement.

–Ariel Finkelstein

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Web analytics is an integral part of any business intelligence portfolio and cannot be avoided in any decision-making phase. But it is perhaps most discussed among online marketers, who require it in order to make the best sales and marketing decisions.

These are often the same users who face a decision between paying for Web analytics tools and using free ones.

Since the time long ago when the release of the free Google Analytics tool created immense noise, significant differences between paid and free tools have emerged.

The biggest advantage of paid Web analytics solutions is the extensive support offered in terms of training, consultancy, and expert advice in measuring every aspect of your Website. Also, free tools normally just show trends and a summary-based view of the data. With paid analytics, it is possible to have much more graphical information, including a summary of data by date presented in dashboards.

The choice of free or paid depends on the intensity of your business. A personal blog or a nonprofit Website might be easily integrated with free Web analytics tools, such as Google’s or those available from BBClone, FireStats, 4Q, Grape Web Statistics, JAWStats, MochiBot, Piwik,Snoop, Woopra, Yahoo! Web Analytics, to name a few.

Free tools like these may well be sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses. And even for a large enterprise, free tools can act as prototypes to showcase the power and importance of eventually opting for paid Web analytics.

A corporate or enterprise Website, in contrast, may require data that can only be furnished by a paid Web analytics solution, such as those available from Clickstream, Clicky, Coremetrics,Lyris (formerly ClickTracks), Mint, Omniture, Unica, or WebTrends, to name a few.

Paid-for Website analytics from suppliers like these will help firms answer queries like the following:

• Which keyword(s) or referral source is giving me the best sales activity?
• Which geography is giving the best clicks and sales?
• Is organic search working well for me? Or is it the inorganic search giving more leads? (Note: Organic search refers results that appear automatically for free; inorganic search results are linked directly to ads or sponsored links.)
• Which is my best online marketing campaign?
• Who are my visitors in terms of geography, age, browsers, etc.?
• What areas of my Website are visitors most interested in?

These reports aren’t the end of what can be done with Website analytics. All the Web intelligence and insights drawn from these tools fall into the area of business intelligence. To be specific, I would call it Website business intelligence.

Users can create spreadsheets and presentations to showcase Website business intelligence. But suppliers offer help here, too. IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), for example, has partnered with WebTrends to deliver Web analytics through IBM’s WebSphere Portal Software, a corporate BI management and reporting system.

Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) and SAS Institute Inc. are in the Web business intelligence area, too: Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems has added the Sun Web Analytics Solution to Oracle’s kitty. And SAS has its own Web analystics tool.

The growing popularity of Web analytics tools is a clear indication of how important it is for any businesses to extract Web intelligence to optimize the user experience on corporate sites. Only Web analytics can help optimize online marketing campaigns while contributing valuable detail to business intelligence.

–Meer Irfan Ali

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