Partner Views Blog

Readers of this blog will know that I am a HubSpot Partner and I offer the platform as one of my solutions. This does not mean that all of my customers use HubSpot nor does it mean that I think every online business should use HubSpot. Part of my job is to help my customers analyze their situation and find the solution that will be right for them. That solution may be HubSpot or it may be Google Ad Words or a WordPress website. There are a number of blogs that have addressed this question and several have gone into a feature by feature comparison. I am not going to go into that much detail here but I’ll give you the links to those blogs below.

This blog will be short because it’s Friday and I know you will want to spend all your time testing out your mobile website. One of the best tools for testing your website is Google’s How to GOMO Test Your Site tool. It could not be simpler to use. Just put your URL in and press the “test” button, choose your business category and answer a few simple questions about the site. In a few seconds you will get an analysis based on the 10 best practices I covered in my last blog.

In my last blog I gave some statistics for why your business should have web pages optimized for mobile. When you are building your web page you need to pay attention to some best practices for mobile web sites otherwise your customers will have a poor experience and probably abandon your site.

2013 should be time to take the plunge and optimize your web site for mobile, especially if you sell products online, you have information that people want to access through their mobile device or if you have any type of local business. It is not that you are preparing for the next phase of internet marketing; your customers are already there. Consider these statistics from Google:

In my last two blogs, Saving your Small Business SEO from Penguins, and Penguins and your Small Business SEO Strategy, I have been talking about the presentation by Geoff Kenyon on Blog Networks, Penguins, & Link Building given at a meeting of the Seattle SEO Network. One of the points Geoff made was that no one should have been surprised by the Penguin updates from Google and the fact that Google was targeting spammy links. Google has been talking about what they have considered good SEO and link building for years. What then, many of the small business owners asked at the meeting, should they do? Many of them do not have the budgets to hire SEO Companies to set their SEO strategy.

In my last blog, Saving your Small Business SEO from Penguins, I mentioned Geoff Kenyon’s talk on Blog Networks, Penguins, & Link Building at a meeting of the Seattle SEO Network. One of the things I noticed was that the attendees tended to fall into one of three groups:

Last week I went to a meeting of the Seattle SEO Network where I had an opportunity to hear a talk on Blog Networks, Penguins, & Link Building by Geoff Kenyon. Geoff is an impressive young man who is a SEO Consultant at Distilled and a Global Associate at SEOmoz so my inclination is to accept him as an authority on the subject. The focus of the discussion was Google’s new algorithm released in April called Penguin. For some details on the changes visit Google’s blog: Search quality highlights: 52 changes for April.

This week I personally experienced the frustration of trying to download some online content where I wasn’t sure where to sign up, the form was not taking my information and after the order I could not find my PDF file to download. Dysfunctional landing pages are bad enough but when I talk to website owners I am always amazed at how many do not have any landing pages at all. In a recent study by HubSpot and presented in my eBook, Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Businesses, websites with over 31 landing pages get 7 times more leads than websites with less than 5 while websites with over 40 landing pages get 12 times more leads. It seems silly that websites that are trying to get leads and new customers would not have any landing pages.

When you consider a website redesign make sure that you do a thorough social media evaluation. A key to inbound marketing, and a critical part of your website, is promotion and getting found. After you create interesting content and optimize the content so that it can be found you need to promote the content. Social media is one of the tools you can use to promote your website and its content but simply putting a “like” button above your blog is not enough. There are three questions you must ask about your plan when doing a social media evaluation:

When you are redesigning your website there are a number of things that affect landing page conversion rates; the color of the call-to-action button on your website, the description of your offer, or if you have a photograph on the landing page or not. The problem is that there is no right or wrong answer on how to improve conversion rates and no master style book that says to do one thing or another. The best course of action is to experiment and try different things. Do more people click a call-to-action button when the button is red or green? Do more people sign up for your newsletter when the sign up form is long or short? Do more people respond to your blog or your newsletter? Do you get more visitors to your offers from Facebook or Twitter? It is important to conduct experiments and try different offers, social media channels, landing pages and calls-to-action to see what works best. Get rid of tactics that don’t work and duplicate those that do work. If one type of offer gets more response then make more offers that are like it and stop making offers that don’t work.