web design
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #5
Feb 26th
People’s brains can do all sorts of tricky things … keep bodies alive, create the internet , that sort of thing. And if you’re in the web marketing game, understanding how they work can be of enormous benefit to your site, and your business generally. Today we continue our ‘Web Marketing with Neuroscience’ series, looking at short term memory and how it affects our internet use.
The limitations of short term memory
Short term memory is also sometimes called working memory. If our brains were like computers (fortunately AND unfortunately, they are not), this would be our RAM. Our short term memory has been observed to be able to hold between 4 and 9 items, depending on the test and the subject. The time duration is highly variable, but averages usually run around 20 seconds. Given the amount of info that we are exposed to on the internet, it makes sense to work with our website visitors’ short term memory limitations as much as possible. So how do you do that?
Working with short term memory
This is actually easier than you might think, and you’ll probably recognise many of the best practice guidelines from other posts we’ve done on usability and web design. So, before you forget what we’re talking about (!), here’s is how you can work within the limits of human short term memory on the web:
- Make sure your pages load quickly: If it takes so long for a page to load that users forget why they clicked it, they’ll just as likely click straight off. Don’t tempt people to look at other tabs while they’re in the middle of the checkout process on your site!
- Change the colour of links that have been visited: This is a site-specific issue, not a browser or computer issue. Every site owner has the responsibility to change the colour of visited links, so users know where they’ve been and feel like they’re running in circles.
- Categorise well: Try to create narrow categories and narrow pages … although not at the expense of maintaining a manageable menu structure.
- Provide a link to the homepage on every page: That way if people forget where they are, there is an emergency link to reset their search.
- Use breadcrumbs: Although, only if appropriate. Not all sites will naturally suit breadcrumbs.
- Offer Live Help and other assistance links within the body of the page: If people have to navigate to the Help section and then back to where they were, chances are that you’ll lose either a purchase or a visitor.
We recommend you check out the rest of our Web Marketing with Neuroscience posts as well … the brain is a fascinating thing, but especially when it could be making you more money 
.
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #4
Feb 12th
There are so many studies that rely on our understanding of neuroscience – marketing is perhaps the most prominent of these (outside of brain surgery!). Today we are looking at how you can improve your connections with customers, your web marketing in general, and of course your SEO performance, by paying attention to how your customers minds work and tailoring your website to make them take action.
Redback spider's mating ritual effectively combines all three important elements ... sex, food and danger!
Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I ‘mate’ with it?
The neuroscience: Whenever our brain encounters something new in the world, it tries to determine three things of it. These three things are closely linked to both personal survivial and the survival of our species, which is an innate drive:
- Can I eat it?
- Will it eat me?
- Can I mate with it? (alternatively known as ‘Will it mate with me?’)
The web marketing tactic: Where you can, try to incorporate elements of each of the three ‘items’ these questions represent into your web content and marketing for it. If you can relate your product to food, sex or danger, your visitors’ brains are wired to instantly pay attention. They will be more likely to read more content, more likely to explore the site further, and more likely to engage with your message than if you have a dry, corporate site. To incorporate food, sex and danger into your website, you can do things like:
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- Use photos of attractive women or men in your marketing – or even ordinary women or men with suggestive expressions or poses
- Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of food or people eating with your products or services. Happy people are usually a good illustration for a wide variety of products – juts pop a little food in their mouths!
- Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of dangerous things with your content
- Highlight in your web copy how your products either help you become more attractive (sex), avoid danger, or remain able to feed yourself (usually related to earning or saving money).
Of note: As with all of these neuroscience tips, don’t overdo it. People can see straight through it when you stretch logic to fit one of these characteristics in, and it usually garners more derision than genuine interest.
3 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Web Marketing Success
Feb 10th
Ecommerce sites have created some of the greatest success stories in the world wide web. Just think Amazon and eBay, and you’ll start to get an idea of how many dollars are generated through ecommerce and the associated web marketing. It’s actually likely that the cheapness, availability and choice that buying on the internet provides, actually boosts the number of dollars spent worldwide and shores up the world’s biggest economies.
How healthy is your website's shopping cart?
So how do you get a slice of the pie?! If you have an ecommerce site, today we are looking at 3 big tips to make life easy for your customers, and therefore sell more online.
1. Look at what happens after the click
There aren’t many actions that you should take without first investigating them. When it comes to ecommerce, it is vitally important to see what visitors do after they land on your site. What is your bounce rate like? What pages do they go to most? What pages do most people exit from? This information forms the building blocks of a successful ecommerce site.
Smart ecommerce sites (and those with a reasonable marketing budget) can also gain plenty of benefit from customized usability testing, eyetracking studies and heat mapping.
2. Add ratings and recommendations … and personalize them
The easiest way to understand this tip is to think of how Amazon interacts with you. If you have an ecommerce site of your own, but no experience with Amazon, go check it out now! While there are some complaints about their site, they generally represent the embodiment of best practices in ecommerce.
Amazon provides personalized recommendations for new products based on what a user has viewed before, and what they have bought before. eBay now does the same.
You can also provide ratings from other users based on a person’s behavior on your site – don’t wait for them to click through to a product page to find out that other people love a product.
3. Add a Live Help function
Most of the problems that people encounter with ecommerce sites can be overcome, or at least mitigated, by offering a Live Help service. When something happens that a consumer isn’t expecting, they don’t have to go searching for their product all over again at a different site. That is actually a lot of work – though it is possible. Live Help keeps customers on-site, even if:
- There isn’t enough product information on a description page
- An error occurs during checkouot
- Return policy is not clearlt stated
- People need to enquire about shipping
- The product is expensive
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #2
Feb 5th
One of the best-selling books of all time is Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’. Everybody wants to know how to get inside other people’s brains and make them do what we want them to … even when we get past adolescence! Today, we are giving you another tip for that very purpose. We’re looking at web marketing with neuroscience; how you can use the quirks and peculiarities of the human brain to get people to take specific actions on your site.
Brain cells - the only real marketing tools!
Put the most important thing to your business first
The neuroscience: In our minds, what comes first is unconsciously regarded as the best. This may be driven by our largely hierarchical society, which has retained that basic structure since the time of our furry ancestors. Or it may not. However this quirk came to be, it is a very real phenomenon in our minds. The number one result in Google gets a whopping 56% of the clicks, according to one study – not the 10% you would expect if all the results on the page have roughly equally valuable content. In many cases content is equal – but our perception of value is different.
The web marketing tactic: Whenever you have several items on a page, and one is more important to you than the others, put it first. For example:
- If you have a list of products, and one is either more likely to build customer loyalty, more likely to get click throughs, or nets you a higher margin, put it first
- If you have one product on site that converts better than all the others, put it first in the list
- If you have one category of products on site that is better fleshed out and converts better than the others, put it first in your menu navigation.
- If you have one piece of evidence for your system that is particularly compelling, put it first in your writeup
- If you have a blog post that consistently gets positive feedback or that contains comprehensive and well-research info, put it first in your list of ‘Popular Posts’. Put the ‘Popular Posts’ widget or list near the top of the page for extra effect.
Of note: If you have a not-so-good product or blog post in ‘first’ position on your site, and visitors go to it expecting to get an optimal example of what your business is like, you are doing your business a major disservice. Your visitors may leave and never come back, believing that the lower quality item is the best you have to offer.
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #1
Feb 3rd
You can do a lot of things with your brain. In fact, without, you can’t do anything at all . You can also do things with other people’s brains, if you have a basic understanding of how to engage certain neural circuits in ways that favour your own ends. This is all sounding a bit mad scientist-ish for internet marketing, I know! It will all become clear very soon. Today we are thoroughly exploring one tip for using the quirks of our human brains (neuroscience) to help get people to take action on your website.
Brain cells - great web marketing tools
Tip of the day: User ratings and reviews
The neuroscience: People are social creatures. It is how we have evolved, and one of the most prominent reasons that we have come to dominate the planet – our ability and drive to cooperate. That drive to fit in, to cooperate rather than confront other humans, can be stimulated by showing your visitors that there is a community that has been built around your product. If you can show other users that there are people that trust your product and believe in its benefits, you are much more likely to convince them.
The web marketing tactic: There are several ways to implement this strategy on your website.
- Enable ratings on your products
- Enable reviews on your products
- Make sure that people visiting the site, as well as people actually leaving reviews, know that reviews aren’t changed by you, no matter what they say. Writing something like “You can instantly publish your review – we do not moderate comments on our products”.
- Add demographic information to ratings and reviews (as an optional extra). People might relate more strongly to a review if they see that the reviewer has similar demographics – age, sex, loaciotn, family status, etc – to themselves.
- Enable comments on your blog and respond to commenters
- Add an ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’ button for comments on your site
- Build a forum that can be an additional resource for site visitors
Ratings and reviews can help new buyers, as well as contributing to their sense of community and social validation. They can also help them rationalize purchasing something they haven’t seen in person – “It worked fine for them, it will probably work fine for me”.
Of note: Testimonials don’t really work for this purpose! Every savvy web user knows that they are selected, edited and wouldn’t be on the site if they weren’t positive. Don’t remove bad reviews, simply post a public response to them offering to clear up the problem.
Applying The Immutable Laws of Marketing in SEO, part 1
Jan 21st
People have written classic books as recently as 1993 – amazing, eh? I thought the only worthwhile thing created that year was hypercolour t-shirts . The classic I’m referring to is a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, written by Al Ries and Jack Trout. It is aimed at marketers in general, but all of the concepts contained within are applicable to internet marketing. Today we are taking a selected look at the laws in a web marketing context.
The ‘First’ Laws
Ironically, the first laws in the book are all about ‘firstness’. Laws 1 through 3 are:
1. It is better to be first than it is to be better.
2. If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
3. It is better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.
In an SEO and web marketing context, one of the most important of this set is number 3 – it is better to be first in the mind than first in the marketplace. As concrete business advice, you can take this to mean “If your competitors are lagging behind in their SEO efforts, you’d better hop on your horse quick to take advantage of that!”. You can have competitors, not be the first in your niche and still succeed – if you see that little opening.
And if you take it a little more literally, you could say that it is better to be first (in the Google rankings) than it is to be better … and you’d have a highly profitable view of business on the web!
Battle of Perceptions
The law we are talking about here, number 4, is : Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.
In the real world, it refers to the importance of brand-building. You should have a brand that is both recognizable and respected. In web marketing this is less important, because consumers are more apt to research and choose, than blindly brand-follow.
Yet, you should always focus on maintaining good perceptions of your business, as well as maintaining good products. If your website looks a little shonky, or you link out to bad neighborhoods, or your website is listed in dodgy directories, you lose in the battle of perceptions. SEO specialists can help determine exactly how those perceptions are best ‘massaged’.
By the way, we’ll be looking at more or less all of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing in an SEO context over the coming weeks … so stay tuned!
“Would You Like a Cup of Tea?” 4 Usability Steps to Keeping Your SEO Traffic Around
Jan 20th
It’s difficult to persuade people to do things (and even to remember things that you say) when you aren’t directly looking at them. This fact has been confirmed by neuroscientific studies across the world, but in SEO we are intimately familiar with it. Most visitors to websites leave within 8 seconds if they don’t see what they are looking for, or if the site seems like hard work, or if it doesn’t match their expectations. Today we are exploring the top 4 usability steps you can take with your website to keep all that traffic so hard-won through SEO, on your site long enough to see how great you are!
A clear visual hierarchy
Step 1: Make use of visual hierarchy rules
Things that are more important on your page should be made obvious with a combination of the following web design aspects:
- Being larger
- Being bolder
- Being more colourful
- Being closer to the top of the page
- Being surrounded by more white space
Step 2: Be conventional
This isn’t business or general marketing advice, but it makes good sense for web design. Take advantage of conventions like putting a search box in the top right of the page, naming certain parts of your site ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact’, etc. This makes you effortless to understand.
Step 3: Segment your pages
If you run Adsense, it’s tempting to make the ads look like content in order to get people to click on them. Design-wise, it isn’t optimal … it simply makes the site harder to understand, and likely to have a higher bounce rate.
Step 4: Link appearance
Make it obvious when something is clickable, either by making it blue and underlining it, or creating 3D effects on it. At the very least, put a single underline on your links. As a side note, you should always make both the picture and text related to a link clickable. If your users can’t figure out how to get round their site, they’ll click off … wasting all that precious web marketing time!
3 Facts of Life in Website Usability and What They Mean for SEO
Jan 18th
SEO is often talked about as the be-all and end-all of website success. While it is a huge and important part of the equation in determining which sites ‘make it’ in the long term, a number one Google ranking certainly isn’t a ticket to paradise! A common scenario is that a company invests all of their cash in getting to the top of Google, and ignores the quality of their website in the process. So when people click through to the site, they find something that looks pretty shonky, not like what they were expecting, or looks difficult to use … and they leave! Assuming you have a good website designer, one of the more common areas that sites fall down is in the usability. Today we are looking at 3 ultimate truths in the context of website usability, and what each of them means to your SEO efforts.
Not when we're on the internet, it isn't!
Truth #1: People scan, they don’t read
Unfortunately, most visitors to your site will read about 10% of the copy that is displayed to them carefully. They know that not everything will be important to them, so they don’t bother. Therefore, make it easy to scan for, and find, the same phrases on the page that people likely searched for to get to your site. Make your keywords prominent, in other words.
Truth #2: People don’t check all the options, they take the first good one
All this means is that if you have one important action that you want people to take on a page (‘Submit’, ‘Buy’, etc), make it the most obvious! Make anything that might help them achieve YOUR website goal in another way obvious also … things like navigation, related products, etc. This way your website can start paying you back, and investing in future internet marketing activities.
Truth #3: We LOVE trial and error
People never figure things out, and they rarely consult the help manual. They most often simply try things until something works. In order to ensure they can do what you want them to with a minimum of errors, get some expert help with website design and usability. And then forge ahead with your SEO campaigns with confidence that your visitors will be worthwhile!
The Things that Make us Think in Website Design
Jan 15th
One of the best known laws of marketing (including web marketing), is that people aren’t interested in you (despite the fact they clicked on your website) … they’re interested in what you can do for THEM.
Another of the most important rules of owning a website is that if you make people think, they will avoid coming back to you. “Argh, my prefrontal cortex!”, they’ll subconsciously scream 
. And in a jiffy, there goes all of the link building, content optimizing SEO effort you’ve put in to get your site to number one in Google in order to get clicks.
Riddip - I didn't want to think!
So, today we are looking at the common website design mistakes that make people think too much, and how you can get around … thereby staying focused on the REAL goal of your internet marketing, which is not to get visitors, but to use visitors to make money.
Thought-Inducer 1: Obscure Titles
When you design your website, use words that aim at the lowest common denominator. Try to let go of the urge to ‘corporatise’ your language. So:
- If you have a page full of jobs, put the word ‘Jobs’ on the button, not ‘Employment Opportunities’
- If you are selling movies on a page, use the word ‘Movies’ on the linking button or navigation, not ‘Digital Video Discs’
You get the idea! There is an example for every industry. Don’t be afraid of sounding ‘dumb’ – remember, people don’t care about you and your vocabulary, they care about themselves!
Thought Inducer 2: Link appearance
You need to make it obvious where you want a person to click on your page. The easiest way to call attention to a link is by using a coloured, beveled, shadowed button. Using a simple coloured square makes it look like a graphic, and using text devalues the importance of the link. Worst of all is not changing the color of your links from the ordinary text color … waaaay too much work!
Thought Inducer 3: Marketing jargon in links
Some common examples of this understandable (but deadly!) usability mistake include:
- ‘Quick Search’ instead of ‘Search’
- ‘Product Types’ instead of ‘Categories’
- ‘Assistance’ instead of ‘Help’
Use the same words everybody else does for standard pages – trying to set yourself apart here often drives your visitors away, and wastes all of those web marketing dollars!.
SEO: Positioning Your Site First – webmarketingexperts.com.au
Sep 18th
Your ranking is critical to your business success. This reality that hits all online businesses must be addressed or the investments on the business will be wasted. A position in the searches can provide a vantage point for your site because this is what users are looking at when they seek information. Thus, a web marketing strategy is needed to bring your site to a good rank in the search results.
Minimize your risk as you are maximizing your online visibility. In some internet advertising methods, you are required to pay larger investments than what SEO is asking. Paid advertising can bring instant results, unlike organic search engine optimization. However, it also gets your position down fast just as how your results went up. In SEO, you cannot bring your site to an instant rank but you must bide a little time to see results. But contrary to the “fast ripe, fast rotten” effect of paid advertising, natural search optimization can make your name stay in searches for a long time.
Your site must also be designed to fit the demands of search engine optimization. This is the reason why a good web design can bring more benefits to make your site become more search engine friendly. When your site shows up in the front pages of SERPs, you can now start to earn huge benefits from this exposure. Business then can be guaranteed with better traffic, and greater conversion from these visits.
If you prefer to bring big graphics and animations to your pages, there is a big chance that you will be left out by search spiders. They do not like to index sites that are hard to download. So, it is preferable to stick to simple but substantial page content. Get high return for your web marketing promotion.
For more ideas on search engine optimization that brings visible results, visit www.webmarketingexperts.com.au.