As a case example we’ll take a Finnish company website with a monthly traffic of around 25 000 visitors. During January 2011 the mobile share was less than 1% of the total inbound traffic—in other words quite insignificant—but after only one year this number has increased to 6%, exceeding older browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 which still have support while the mobile browsers do not—time to take action.

Another example, this time from Sweden is an online web store which mobile share increased from 3% in 2011 to 11% in January 2012, a trend is obvious and it will only continue to grow.

The main problem we’re now faced with is within this mobile share, where there are hundreds of device, screen size and browser combinations. It’s virtually impossible to cater all these combinations with the old idea of serving different sites for different users. Native applications has been another option but this is far from cost-effective as it requires vast amounts of work to develop and keep up to date across different devices. Not really a viable investment for regular companies without a specialized web service. But still, companies should strive to provide a good user experience across the board to all its users.

Enter responsive web design

The buzzword across the web ever since Ethan Marcotte toyed the term on A List Apart in 2010 has been responsive web design. This is the cost-effective solution everyone has been looking for. The idea of it is to create one site, and adapt it to all users with simple rules, triggered when the viewport size changes, adapting the layout to fit all screen sizes. The best—or the most future proof—way to do this is by creating the site with a so-called fluid grid system, using percentages opposed to the fixed grid layout that uses pixels. This way the grid is layout agnostic and easily adaptable.

A technical brief of responsive grids.

A common structure for a responsive layout is defining a maximum width for a wrapping element limiting the layout size for desktop screens, which can have very high resolutions. As the default behavior for block elements in HTML is to span the entire width available, this wrapper will become smaller as the screen changes in size, creating the first building block of a responsive design.

Once the wrapper is set, all sizes defined within are set with a percentage unit. For example, a three-column view might use 32% width and a 1% margin and images might use a maximum width of 100% to span as much as possible while not affecting the image quality.

With this grid system the site is now responsive for most tablets and upwards. For smaller screens, columns probably become too tight for a good interface so this is where one uses a triggered rule with the help of CSS media queries. The designer can resize their own screen or use a tool like responsivepx to find the breakpoint where the layout needs to change and then define a rule to e.g., make columns span the entire width of the wrapper instead of 32% pushing all other columns beneath it. Several of these rules might be needed to provide a responsive web design which provides good experience but in comparison to creating an entirely different layout for mobile users this is trivial. When combined with modern tools such as CSS-preprocessors these rules can also be incorporated with the rest of the related logic making it easier than all other options to maintain in the long run.

But now we suppose that you know this. You know that your conversion rate is 2%. Which means 2% of your visitors does the “thing” you want. You cannot say if 2% is a high or a low number, it is different in every niche, but for this article we use a 2% conversion rate as example. 

Now you can make your business grow in two ways, one way is to get more visitors and keep the conversion rate, and the other is to keep the same amount of visitors and improve the conversion rate.  

• For websites with a low visitor count: I suggest you start with getting more visitors. By doing content marketing. This is what this blog post is gonna be about. 
• For websites with a lot of visitors: Focus mostly on getting a higher conversion rate. Make more visitors become customers, then you will get more money, and with that you afford to focus even more on growing your visitor count later. And profit more. But more about this another time.

Let’s talk about getting more visitors. By doing content marketing like a boss!

Okay, you know what content marketing is? Anyway, I’ll tell you an example, it is all about creating content on the sites you control, content that other people read, like, share, and probably convert from. Often it is company blogs, videos, infographics, pictures, fun stuff, statistics, everything that your target group may be interested in. Let’s say you have understood that you need to create this kind of content all the time. And we focus on blogging and articles, which is the easiest one to profit from (I think). And you have a Facebook page as well, and maybe a twitter account where you share your content when you have been writing it. And the people that reads your content mainly comes from this kind of sites, and of course, the loyal visitors that always hang around your site reads it as well. But that’s about it. You might get a bunch of more visitors from Facebook if you make something so great that people starts sharing it, but it is all temporary visits. You get the visitors because of writing and sharing it on Facebook. Of course, you get some visits from Google as well, and that number grows a little all the time when you get more content, including more and more long tail searches, but it is not as effective as it could be. 

The picture above visualizes the traffic that comes to the /blog or /articles part of your website. It is usually like this if you just have started, or have just a few visitors. Always when posting something, the traffic spikes, and comes mostly from the sites you shared the content on. But the average amount of traffic is not rising so much, you will still pay the same for every visitor even a year after starting with your content marketing. 

This picture visualises a much better curve. The traffic still spikes when posting things, but here it does not go back as low as it was before the post. This is the result of a better planned content marketing, the traffic should increase at least a little for every new post. 

Why plan your content marketing?

I think you got it already, but I can make it all much clearer as well. Every visitor costs money. Money that in content marketing usually is time. And if you have counted how much your content marketing all together costs, you will know what a single visitor costs as well. And if you continue as in picture one, the price per visitor will never become lower. If one visitor costs 5 euros in the beginning, it will cost about the same after one year. And if the value of visitors are lower than this, you will only lose money. It would be cheaper to buy visitors from AdWords than do that kind of crappy content marketing. 

But if the angle of the red arrow is bigger, if you with every post gets new visitors, you will eventually end up with almost “free” visitors, that costs you a lot less to get than what they are worth. The cost for visitors will become half of what it was quite fast in the beginning. And then half of that. And then a lot lower than any CPC campaign would give you.

If you always try to get the angle of the red arrow to be as big as possible, you will succeed in content marketing. 

How to plan content marketing for success?

This post is mostly about telling why a planned content marketing is great, how to plan it can get its own blog post later. But I’ll share one way already by now. And that is planning your content for getting visitors from Google.

It goes like this: seek for phrases in Google Keyword tool or in your AdWords reports that have searches every month. If a non-competitive search term that fits the topic of your site has a hundred or more searches per month, then go for it and write a post about it. If it fits your topic, you will quite easy end up on the first page of Google, and drive “free” traffic from there as long as you are there. And you will probably be there for a long time if it is a longer phrase. And you will still get the same spike when you share the post to your loyal fans. The only difference is that the amount of visitors will not become as low as before when the spike is over. Even a couple of more visitors is a step towards cheaper and cheaper visitors. But we can step it up a little.

A simple plan for simple content marketing: Make a list of headings to write about for a time, example a half a year from now. Check how many searches every phrase have next to it. Write when you are going to publish it. Do some math. Count how many more new visitors you will get every month. And divide it with ten. Because Google always tells you too high numbers, and you will not always end up on first page.

Now you will have a great view of how many visitors you might get every month in half a year after now. The time for writing about the topics you have planned for is not more than it would be for writing something else. So the cost for writing the content will be the same. But the amount of visitors will get higher every month. Calculata as well the “cost” for making the content and compare it to the amount of visitors. Divide (You did not think blogging was about math, right?). You will see that the cost for a visitor will decrease all the time, even if you spend the same time writing as you did before. 

You will see when you reach break even. When the cost for a visitor is equal to what it is worth. You will see how far away that point is. Or how close. And after that point, every minute spent on making new content will give instant payback. 

The big fat conclusion

Do you see it? This whole post is just a reflection of marketing campaigns in general. The spikes are successful marketing campaigns, and the visitors are sales. Adapt the same plan to all the marketing you are making. Do not make “successful” campaigns that does not give you anything anymore when it is finished. Do campaigns that gives you value even after ending it. Campaigns that are planned for success. Not only short term, the spikes are easy to get. After the spike, the sales should be higher than before. Plan a year of this kind of campaigns, and try to get the red arrow as steep as possible. I am quite sure that leads to some kind of marketing success. 

I got the idea for this blog post after making this kind of plans and after reading Jesper Åströms post about data driven marketing strategies. If you have read this far, you could keep on reading that post as well. And do not forget to drop me a comment if you think that I am totally wrong. Or if you think I have a point. And contact us asap if you want to boost yout content marketing, or even get started with successful content marketing.

Why use Facebook timeline and covers on your fanpage?

First, it goes live for everyone on March 30 anyway, so why not use it already and be a pioneer? Second, it is so much nicer with the big cover photo on top where you can show whatever you want that describes your company. And with the timeline, you can add your whole company story to Facebook, your Facebook page will attract a lot more attention than a normal looking page. 

How to add Facebook timeline and covers for our page?

The only thing you need to do is to browse to your page as an admin, and then check at the top of the page, where it says “Coming Soon: New Facebook Pages”. 

Click preview for getting started. Then upload a cover photo and you will be all set. Last but not least, when you click publish, your page will go live for everyone visiting it.

Opportunities with the new page look!

With the new timeline and cover-look you can give a lot more space to your apps, you are able to spread them out to full width of the page. I just wonder when non-branded Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands fans starts to sell the big cover photo as ad space? What do you think?  

Check the Genero branded Facebook page here!

Do you want to know more, or want help with your Facebook presence? Do not hesitate to contact us by using the form below!

Evaluate visitors with e-commerse tracking in Google Analytics

When Google Analytics sees what every product costs, and keeps track of who buys the products, and keeps track of how much they buy, the program can tell you how much every visitor is worth.

Different visitors have different value

You will then easily see which kind of visitors that are worth the most. Is it the ones that comes from a forum? or the ones that comes from Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or Pinterest? Or is it the ones that finds your site from a Google search? If so, you will also see what keyword the most valuable visitors have been searching for when getting to your site. 

Use this data for bigger profit

I think you get this. When you know what kind of visitor is worth the most, you can easily start working towards getting more and more of this type of visitors.

E-commerse tracking for knowing if Google AdWords is the way to go

When you know an exact value for visitors arriving from search, and this value is bigger than what a visitor costs if you “buy” them from Google AdWords,  you can simply buy as much pay per click visitors you want from Google AdWords and still make profit. You might even find out that if you buy more cpc, you get even more profit. I have heard that this is called ROI. 

Examples for making it clear

Example 1: You see that visitors from a forum is worth 0,41€ each and that visitors from another forum is worth 0,76€ each. Then I think that you really easy can figure out in which of the two forums you should spend more time trying to get visitors.

Example 2: You see that the average visitor is worth 0,79€. You find out that visitors for your niche costs about 0,46€ per click in Google AdWords. You can then buy as much pay per click visitors you want from Google AdWords, and still make profit. And if you even optimize the AdWords campaign for getting lower cpc prices, you get even more profit.

This was a post that I hope describes the value of e-commerse tracking with Google Analytics in a good and easy way. If you have questions, or if you want to get e-commerse tracking set up in your website or webshop, or want to start or optimize your AdWords campaign, do not hesitate to contact us by filling in the contact form found below.

Writing search engine optimized texts, step by step

1. Chose a word or phrase to focus on. One phrase per text. You can find phrases with a lot of monthly searches in Google Keyword tool here. 
2. Use the word in the title of your page. The title is the text that is shown in the tab in your browser when you are visiting a site. It is also shown as heading when you see a page in the Google search results.
3. Use the word in the text content of your page as often as possible without making it look crowded. Between 1 and 5 percent of the text is good. (1 to 5 times for every 100 words).
4. Use the word in your main heading for the page (h1). There should only be one h1, and it can be the same as the title.
5. Use subheadings (h2 and h3) and use the word in at least one of each if you have several.
6. Write long texts. At least 250 words. At least 500 words is what I recommend.
7. Use the word in the url path for the page.
8. Use the word in bold, italic, and in lists on the page.
9. Use the word in a pictures alt-tag on the page. Just do it, it really works. It will help the picture show up in Google image search as well.
10. If you can, use the word in the beginning and in the end of your text as well. (Read: in the first and the last sentence. This is no strict rule)

Test if your texts are written in a search engine optimized way

Remember that you always can check if your texts are search engine friendly when you are ready. You can check them for free in our onpage SEO-tool here, it is really easy. Read more about how to use the SEO-tool here.

How does the tool help me with onpage optimization?

That can easiest be described by telling you how the onpage seo tool works:

1. You write a text on your website (read here about how to write search engine optimized texts)
2. You paste the url to the page where the text can be found in the first box in the SEO Tool.
3. You write your keyword or phrase in the second box. Only one keyword or phrase at a time is allowed. 
4. Add your email adress in the last box and hit “Analyse SEO”! The results will be shown immediately.
   (Your e-mail address will never be used for marketing, you will never receive mails from us, we only need it to be filled for preventing spam-requests in the tool all the time). 

Click on the picture for accessing the onpage SEO Tool

What does the points in the Onpage SEO tool mean?

You will see how many SEO-points your page is getting when you have submitted the needed data. You might get as much as 100 points, and as low as 0 points. The more the better. If you get 70 points I would say that your page is quite well optimized, you might just want to change a couple of things to make it perfect. If you are getting 20 points you have a lot to win if you change your text so that it becomes 70 or more, then I am quite sure that the Google rankings and traffic to your site will increase.

How to get better SEO Score in the Onpage SEO tool?

That´s easy. Just follow the hints presented in the column “Things you can improve”. Just change all of the things you can read about there, and run the test again. Do this for every article and text you write, and you will get a lot more visibility in the search engines. And if it is not enough, you can always contact us, then we will figure out the right way for your website together!

Having a company blog will increase your traffic

That’s not even one of the five reasons. That is just a fact. And I suppose you like traffic to your site? And most of all, free and relevant traffic? Then read on:

1. With a blog you get more content

Content is good. Every time you write a blog post your site is growing. Every blog post means one more unique url filled with content. That is a whole lot of new phrases that people actually can search for and therefore find your site.

2. You get a place where you can write about trends

With trends I mean things that happens in your niche. In every business area there are trends going on. And trends are searched for. So by writing about trends, people will actually find your site when searching for the trends.

3. You can take advantage of seasons

The year changes frequently. People are searching for different things in the summer than they are doing right before Christmas. By having a place where you can adapt your content to the seasons, you will get the people looking for seasonal content into your site. For example, when Christmas comes, you can easily write some blogposts where you suggest Christmas-gifts to people, where you suggest Christmas food, or anything else associated with both the season and your company. If you are a small company that cannot afford costly Christmas-campaigns, you can make own ones in your blog.

4. You get a place where you can answer your customers questions

Every time you get a question from a customer or contact, in person or by phone, you probably answer it, and the customer is happy. And if one customer had a question, at least some other might have the same question. And people search for answers to questions by typing in the question in Google. So now you probably see already why your blog is a golden place where you can write about the question, and of course answer it, right away. And a lot of  people searching  for the question will find your blog, and your company site.

5. Fresh content gives your site a lot of privileges in search engines

Google loves a frequently updated site. If you update your blog once a week, Google get used to find new content once a week. And that will gain your whole site. You will get better search engine rankings as well for the other pages on your site, and more traffic generally.