At this stage I think most tool providers have added the word ‘AI’ onto their website.

Even if they haven’t fully embraced AI the market demands that they demonstrate that AI is a core part of their offering going forward.

Say it and they will come… then build it after you say it!

But I’m not being fair to everyone because some tool providers have moved quickly to integrate AI as part of their offering and some are built with AI In mind from the ground up.

The following outlines 11 useful things to do with AI marketing tools:

1.Create an auto translated video with Heygen

Heygen is an AI based video creation tool where you can automatically create a video from text and have an Avator talk through your video.

But one really useful feature they have launched is the ability to automatically translate a video to many languages.

This is a really cool feature. I uploaded the following in English and now I’m speaking perfect Spanish. Not bad eh!!!

2.Get your script written and use AI editing with Vimeo

Imagine if you wanted to create a promotional video but weren’t sure of the exact script to use. Feed some info into Vimeo and it will automatically create the script for you. You can edit if it doesn’t suit and then it will display this as you record.

And when you record it if you want to strip out any of the recording you can just remove the text and that section from the video will be removed!

3. Implement an AI powered chatbot using Wonderchat

Gone are the days when you have to feed all your answers into a Chatbot.

Instead you point the Chatbot to the source of likely questions your customer will have and it will process all of this and automatically have good answers.

So, for example, it will crawl all your website to find the answers to questions that website visitors are likely to have.

Then for the questions that can’t be answered you can provide an email or let the website visitor connect with an agent.

Check out Wonderchat

4. Set up ChatGPT custom instructions for more personalised responses

A paid subscription to ChatGPT is definitely worth the money because you get access to ChatGPT 4 which has a much broader database and is more accurate.

One of the features you should take advantage of is custom instructions you can provide to ChatGPT.

You access this from the bottom left hand corner 3 dots and the menu item ‘custom instructions’.

In this you can provide information about yourself and how you’d like responses to be (e.g. long/short, formal/casual etc).

5. Use Descript to adjust the eyes of a presenter

Descript is an excellent tool to edit videos and podcasts and it’s adding in a lot of AI. For example, you can delete sections of a transcript of a video and this will cut out the relevant bits of a video.

One feature I love is the ability to adjust eye position so the person is looking at you through the video!

So many times people are reading scripts or looking down and that is not good for engagement. This will help significantly with engagement

Have you played around with ChatGPT advanced data analytics?

It’s pretty cool.

I pasted in an article which had a lot of details about electric cars. I then asked it to pick out the relevant data from this article and produce a table.

Try importing your analytics data and ask it questions about this data. It’s pretty powerful!

You know when you are at a zoom meeting and you get distracted and lose track about what they are talking about….

Well….with the AI assistant you can ask questions such as:

• Was my name mentioned and if so what did they say?
• What have they talked about so far?
• Send me a summary of the meeting after?
• Write up the actions

8. Use Rapidely to generate content ideas and content

Gone are the days when you sat down to write out some social media content and you had to come up with your own ideas which don’t always come!

With Rapidely you feed it some information about your business, posting schedule, tone of voice etc and then it will give you a range of ideas.

Once you have the ideas you select the ones that are relevant and then it will help you create the content using AI. This is a real time saver!

9. Build out your landing page with Headlime

When I used to sell online digital marketing training courses and a monthly subscription programme I used to create a lot of landing pages.

They were so time consuming to create.

Headlime is a very useful tool for creating content and one part of this is for Landing pages.

You define what you are selling, the sections you want and copy is automatically created.

It even creates all the HTML code for the copy so you have your fully built landing page in no time.

This tool would have saved me about 75% of my time!

10. Generate your marketing emails with Getresponse

Getresponse is a really good, cost effective, email marketing tool.

They recently added AI onto the tool for creating emails and it will save you a ton of time.

For example, if you wanted to create an onboarding welcome series of emails for new blog subscribers you can feed in some info regarding what you want in each email, the industry you are in and the tone of emails and voila, it automagically creates them!

11. Create code for your website design using builder.io

Figma is very commonly used tool for designers when you want to create wireframes or designs for websites.

So imagine if you created a design in Figma and instead of handing this over to a developer to build the code you click a button and the code is automatically created.

This where builder.io comes in. It is an add on to Figma where you can convert your designs into code – React, Vue, Qwik, Angular, Solid and HTML.

How websites are developed is changing.

I think the tools that claim to use AI to create designs are pretty poor. Designers are still going to be very important in web development.

But….we’ll need a lot less coders and the ones that are employed will spend significantly less time writing code.

Summary

Most software companies claims they have AI as part of their offering because they can’t claim they have fallen behind in a fast moving industry.

A lot don’t have anything worth talking about.

But then there’s amazing advances in some applications that is so interesting to watch and get benefit from.

Hopefully this article gave you some useful ideas!

The post 11 Extremely useful things to do with AI Marketing Tools appeared first on RazorSocial.

I was at ITB recently (travel conference) and after a session on blockchain one of the audience members said she still did not understand blockchain.

The presenter tried to explain it but left the audience more confused.

So…..

…I’m going to have a go at what the presenter failed at. There’s 21 questions worth answering about it…

1. What is blockchain in simple terms?

A lot of information is stored in databases. Typically (not always) you have one master copy of this database and databases are not too difficult to hack.

For blockchain the transactions are stored in blocks. You can have many transactions in a block. A block is part of many blocks that are linked to together…hence…the name blockchain!

When you use blockchain a copy of all transactions (stored in blocks) is created in many different places and the way it is setup means it’s very difficult (not impossible) to hack it and create fraudulent transactions.

Think of blockchain like a spreadsheet with a list of all transactions and there’s many identical copies of this spreadsheet in many locations. To add a transaction to a sheet it’s not just one authority (i.e. a bank) that decides if a transaction is valid it is validated by hundreds or thousands of computers and they all keep an exact copy of the transactions. The way blockchain is set up is very hard to create fraudulent transactions.

Some words you’ll often hear when talking about blockchain:

Mining – These are the computers that get rewarded for validating transactions and get paid for doing it.

Public Ledger – The ledger is the transactions and public means that no one central authority controls everything.

Distributed – When transactions are verified it could be using computers all over the world and not in a central hub.

Ye there’s more to it than that but read on…..

2. What’s the basic sequence for a blockchain transaction?

• Someone raises a transaction requested.
• This is represented in a block
• Nodes on a network (i.e. computers) are watching for new blocks.
• All nodes try to solve a mathematical puzzle (which I’ll explain later)
• The first to solve the puzzle gets rewarded and the rest of the nodes validate the transaction. Now it’s part of the blockchain
• The transaction is completed

3. What type of transactions can you process on blockchain?

A transaction refers to a contract, agreement, transfer, or exchange of assets between two or more parties.

For example:

You transfer some bitcoin from one person to another…or….

The ownership of a car is transferred based on certain conditions met according to the ‘contract’. So what’s stored in blockchain is proof of ownership.

4. Why is it called ‘Blockchain’ ?

The Block’ is where you store the transaction information and when the block is full another block is created that is linked to the other block… and voila we have a chain… a Blockchain!!!

Block header

This contains the following:

• Hash of previous block – This is basically a reference number for the previous block. When a previous block becomes full of transactions the next set of related transactions are added to a new block and the previous one is referenced (i.e. Blockchain….get it!!!)
• Time stamp – This is the exact time at when the block was created
• Nonce – This is an abbreviation for number used once. In blockchain this is a random number which can only be guessed and can’t be calculated. When a transaction needs to be verified the nonce is created and to verify the transaction the computers in the same network need to guess what the nonce is.
• Merkle root – Every transaction occurring on the blockchain network has a hash associated with it. However, these hashes are not stored in a sequential order on the block, rather in the form of a tree-like structure such that each hash is linked to its parent following a parent-child tree-like relation.

Body

This is where all the transactions are stored.

6.What is a blockchain validator?

A validator is how transactions are verified. There’s a couple of different methods of validating transactions, here are 2 popular ones:

• Proof of work
• Proof of stake

7. What is proof of work?

When transactions are initiated they are queued on the network to get validated. The validators are keeping an eye out for transactions and batch some into a block.

In a blockchain network you could have thousands of validators and they are all trying to validate transactions. However, what you want is one to validate and then the others to verify.

So how do you validate….

A nonce is a number only used once.

Within the block there is a nonce and all validators have to try to guess this nonce. They are solving a mathematical puzzle.

This takes up a lot computational power (and electricity) as all the nodes are competing.

When one node figures out the nonce they get rewarded and can add the block to the blockchain.

But the majority of the other nodes on the network need to confirm they are happy with this new block. This is called consensus.

This diagram shows this process. Later on I’ll explain the encryption.

8. Why is there a mathematical puzzle for validator to add a block to the blockchain?

The main reason for this is to stop spammers, spoofers etc setting up and validating transactions.

To validate a transaction it takes time and it costs money (hardware, electricity etc). If a spammer want to get transactions onto the block chain they’d have to own enough computers on the blockchain to achieve consensus (e.g. at least 51%). This would be extremely expensive.

They could set up one machine and may solve the puzzle but every other nodes needs to agree that it’s confirmed as part of the blockchain.

This method of validating was initially created to slow down the sending of email so spammers couldn’t send massive amounts of spam very quickly.

9. Is proof of work scalable?

No absolutely not!

The proof of work system does not make sense because if transactions on public blockchain grew massively we’d be taking a noticeable percentage of the world wide electricity available!

Bitcoin is by far the biggest cryptocurrency that still uses proof of work and will probably stay that way.

But Bitcoin will never have a huge amount of transactions. It’s not a currency that is typically used for buying and selling stuff, storing title deeds, digital art etc. It’s typically just people gambling on bitcoin buying and selling it.

Proof of of work is totally unscaleable and it’s a pretty dumb system when you want something long term that will grow as more transactions occur on blockchain.

Etheruem are the second biggest cryptocurrency and they just moved from proof of work to proof of stake. They will save 99.95% electricity!!

10. How many transactions per second can be processed on bitcoin using proof of work?

The average number of transactions that can be processed for bitcoin on a blockchain network is 5 per second.

The average number of transactions that can be processed for Visa (not blockchain) – Between 1,500 and 2,000.

Euthereum processed around 30 transactions per second using proof of work but their recent move to Euthereum 2.0 means they can process 100k transactions per second. This massive increase is mainly because of proof of stake and sharding. I bet you now want to know what both of these are….

11. What is proof of stake?

Proof of stake is a more sensible approach to validating and storing transactions on block chain.

To participate as a validator you need to put up some cryptocurrency which is locked and you can’t touch it. This stops all the fraudsters.

When there’s a transaction on the blockchain a node is selected based on multiple factors one of which is how much they have staked (i.e. put up as collateral). If it ends up that they are fraudsters they can lose all the money they staked.

So instead of having thousands of nodes trying to compete to process a transaction proof of stake selects one.

Proof of work is so dumb for delivering a scalable solution…

12. What is sharding?

Most cryptocurrencies now use proof of stake to process transactions. But Euthereum also introduced sharding which enables to them process even more transactions per second.

Sharding is breaking up blockchain into smaller chunks which improves performance. Each chunk is called ‘Shard’.

SHARD is an old database term which means system for highly available replicated data.

14. What is a mining pool?

15. What encryption is used for sending blockchain transactions?

17. What is immutable?

Immutable means the data has not been manipulated, replaced or falsified. It’s a permanent record of a transactions that cannot be altered.

18. What’s a smart contract?

These are digital contracts stored on blockchain that automatically get executed when predetermined terms and conditions are met.

For example:

If x money is transferred from A to B to buy a car then the ownership document of the car gets updated with the new owner.

19. What’s a genesis block?

This is the first block in a blockchain and hence it won’t have a reference to a previous block…because…there isn’t one!

As it’s the first block it does have some additional information such as configurations and rules for the smooth running of the blockchain.

20. What’s a transaction pool?

This is a list of pending transactions waiting to be validated on the blockchain network.

Once a transaction is taken from the pool and verified it’s important that every node is made aware so they can validate and this will keep all nodes in sync.

21. Is there a future for blockchain?

I think most crypto currencies will fail because most offer not value at all.

I think blockchain has made some improvements to validating that will significantly increase it’s chances of success (e.g. proof of stake and sharding).

But I think more improvements are required and there’s a big issue with people not being able to understand the technology.

So yes there’s a future but make sure to seperate blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Digital currencies provided by the Government will replace most cryptocurrencies and these digital currencies will be exchanged over blockchain.

I’d love to hear your thoughts over on LinkedIn. Please share and tag me.

The post Blockchain Simplified: 21 Questions with relatively simply answers! appeared first on RazorSocial.

Unless you’ve been living under a stone for a while you must have heard of ChatGPT….

When you type in something into Google you get a list of links which has information that will help with what you are looking for.

With ChatGPT you can ask a question and get the answer or ask it to do something (e.g. write a poem).

This is really smart use of Artificial Intelligence and this is going to stimulate huge demand for AI.

If you look at Google trends this shows the searches for ‘AI’ over the last 5 years. You can see that for a few years there was not much increase in searches but over the last year it’s started to grow. The big spike is when ChatGPT was released.

You will see these searches dramatically increase over the next few years.

Yes we’re on to something that is going to be huge!!!!

But don’t get too carried away…

ChatGPT has a lot of limitations…

• It’s not always accurate
• It’s not the most up to date
• It helps more than replaces

But it is extremely useful and very exciting to watch it’s development and many other similar tools that will be publicly available.

Practical uses of the ChatGPT tool for Marketing

So lets going through some practical uses of ChatGPT for Marketing:

1. Help create content

If you think that this tool is going to magically create great content for you without any intervention then you are setting your standards low and your content will be average at best.

There will be many issues including the quality of content, lack of original thoughts and it not representing your voice.

But it is a very useful to support your content creation.

For example, if I was writing a post about image optimisation I’d ask the tool to give me some information and this gives me a head start with some ideas. Here’s part of the result:

There’s one thing for sure….. there’s going to be very little new content on the web in the future that did not have some AI tool helping.

Note: The following was shared by Kieran Flanagan (CMO of Zapier).

2. Improve Customer Service

There’s a lot of Chatbots out there that get stuck with basic questions.

ChatGPT is going to provide a more helpful customer service tool that will provide better answers to customers and thus…

• Reduce the number of people required to deal with customer service issues
• Reduce time to respond to customer requests
• Get better as it learns

3. Creating Ad copy

It’s ok creating a couple of ads but what about when you need to create hundreds of variations of ads…

…yawn…….

…yes ChatGPT can take the yawn out of this.

Here’s original ad copy:

And here’s some suggested alternatives that would be worth split testing:

4. Find issues in code

Maybe there’s not that many Marketers that code out there.

But…there are more and more tools that can produce code (including ChatGPT).

The challenge is finding issues in the code and ChatGPT can do this.

Here’s an example of some text I have in this article. The replacement text probably reads better but doesn’t read like I wrote it so I wouldn’t use it. I’m not the best at producing gramatically perfect content but that’s not why people read my posts!

5. A research tool

It’s a fantastic research tool where you can quickly research lots of different areas.

If you’re writing a post about podcasting you could ask questions such as:

• What are the best tools for podcasting
• Who are the top influencers in podcasting
• What are the most important things to know about podcasting

6. Support PR campaigns

There are many potential uses in this area, for example:

• Find relevant Journalists to pitch to
• Create copy relevant to the Journalist for outreach
• Analyze Journalist content to find out what interests them

7. Generating email copy

Creating email copy can be very time consuming. It would be great to get help!

• Onboarding sequences
• Email outreach campaigns
• Email funnel sequences

• Automated responses which is based on the email from clients

Lots of potential uses.

8. Improve existing content

You can paste in an existing piece of content into ChatGPT and ask it to improve it.

And it’s pretty good!!!

9. Transcription and Summarising

Paul Roetzer (founder of Marketing AI institute) shared this idea on Linkedin and I thought it was a good one!

Someone on LinkedIn said that their updates were too long on LinkedIn.

Paul suggested to record a video, get ChatGPT to transcribe and then summarise the transcription.

You could then ask ChatGPT to create Tweets, Facebook updates etc for the transcription.

Very handy!

10. Generating Social Media copy

What percentage of people see the tweet you share?

The engagement rate is the percentage of people that see your tweet compared to engaging with it:

Here’s how you could rate your engagement rates:

So you have to share a lot of tweets multiple times and it’s a pain coming up with different variations of the same Tweet so you can use ChatGPT to come up with those variations.

Of course this can apply to other platforms also.

11. Helping with your SEO

Building your website/page authority to drive more traffic is time consuming. ChatGPT won’t replace the SEO person but it will help speed up the process.

A). Here’s 3 examples Pete O’Connor from Bullet Accounting (great Accounting package) shared with me this video of a Chrome extension which uses ChatGPT for SEO. It’s pretty good….

ChatGPT Chrome Extension

This can help with:

• Find best place to add links to an article
• Help identify keywords to target
• Compare with other top ranking articles and find suggestions for improving ranking of yours
• Generate meta title and descriptions for pages
• Generate a list of popular/relevant websites to reach out to (e.g. link building)

Check out the ultimate FAQ for SEO Marketers for ChatGPT

12. Analyse and extract relevant information from reviews

If your business (or your clients business) gets regular reviews online you can paste all of the reviews into the tool and get it to analyse. You can also get it to create a word cloud where it picks out what people are typically saving about the business.

I copied in reviews for a lively Hotel in the City Centre of Dublin in a location suitable for young people. It figured this out based on the reviews!!

“Overall, it seems like a solid choice for younger guests or those looking for a fun, vibrant location in the city”

13. Creating Powerpoint presentations!

I’m speaking at an awesome travel conference called TBEX in Greece. I know…it’s a tough life!!!

My topic is about getting more from your website. I asked ChatGPT to list out the slides/content for the slides and it certainly gives you some good ideas for structure and content. When you have brain freeze this kicks things off for you again. Here’s an example:

I’m thinking of changing our company name ‘RazorSocial’ and wanted an opinion on the names that I came up with. This was really useful and gave me some great ideas.

So just bouncing some marketing ideas off ChatGPT is definitely useful.

17. Find out what you’re doing wrong

The post 17 Practical Uses of ChatGPT for Marketing appeared first on RazorSocial.

In this article we outline the tasks required for performing an audit to verify compliance with WCAG 2.1 standard.

Accessibility is about ensuring your website content and functionality can be accessed by a wider audience.

For example:

• Temporary accessibility barrier – Someone has lost their glasses!
• Device issues – They are on a device that is restrictive e.g. mobile phone
• Situational – Bright sunlight, dark room etc
• Permanent disability – No sight, no hearing, cognitive issues etc.
• Bandwidth issues – A very slow connection

As you can see there are many forms of disability that you need to consider.

The WCAG guidelines is broken down into the following:

Before going through each section here’s a list of what you’ll need to perform testing:

1. Perceivable

• A selection of browsers including text only (e.g. Lynx)
• A tool for checking alt tags, headings etc (e.g. ScreamingFrog)
• A screen reader such as NVDA
• A website accessibility test tool
• Chrome development tools
• Access to a selection of devices

This is about making sure that content is accessible in various forms. For example, someone can see the content, listen to it, use touch to understand the content etc. This also includes user interface items such as menus and buttons.

The WAVE accessibility tool is one of many tools that can be used to find issues in this area:

In the above example the page does quite well. It only has 1 error and 5 errors with colour contrast issues.

The one error is that this page doesn’t indicate the language.

But there are lots of good things on the page. For example, in the image on the right where you see 2 elements highlighted in green, these both use the ‘ARIA’ labels to help a screen reader understand this content. Later on we’ll explain more about this.

Let’s go through the guidelines and the success criteria.

Guideline 1.1 -Providing text alternatives to non text content

Are there text alternatives to non text content?

When you have non text content on a screen you need to verify that there are descriptions for each of those elements.

Before we give examples I want to discuss ARIA which is a way of providing additional descriptions to elements and should only be used when standard HTML is not possible.

When you use HTML you automatically get keybord control, focus etc. and that is the preference but ARIA can be used as a backup.

What is ARIA?

ARIA (accessible rich internet applications) is a way of describing content that cannot be described sufficiently using standard HTML. It’s main purpose is for screen readers. If you can use standard HTML then that is the best approach because it will automatically provide focus to the element and keyboard control. When this is not possible ARIA is the alternative.

Descriptive Images

A descriptive image is something that portrays something of meaning. For example, a picture of a Toyota Prius car.

If you cannot see the picture then there needs to be a way of describing what this picture represents which is where an Alt tag comes in.

In platforms such as WordPress you can add the alt tag when uploading the image:

Quite often we update this alt tag to make sure relevant keywords are included for SEO purposes but we need to go beyond this.

Screaming frog will do an analysis of all images on your website and display which images have no alt tags, duplicate alt tags, alt tags that are too long or alt tags that are too short!

You can see the images alongside the details of the image also:

Decorative image

A decorative image is an image that is there to enhance the design but there’s nothing in the image worth describing!

Decorative images should use the CSS background property unless there’s a good reason to use the ‘img’ tag. If a screen reader sees the CSS background property it knows to ignore the image.

Here’s an example of an image described as a background image in My Emergency Doctor website in Australia:  

Here’s the code behind this:

Because this image is not listed as <img> it uses the role=img to let screen readers know this is an image. It uses the ‘Aria-label’ to give a good accurate description of the image. It also defines the image as ‘background-image’.

Note: If you use the ‘img’ tag for a background image you need to define a null alt tag e.g. alt=” “

When should you use <img> instead of background-colour?

When an image is an important part of the content then use <img>. For example, if you have a product image then this is <img> . You could also have images which are just background images used for decoration purposes and it doesn’t make sense to describe these as images (which will be indexed by Google).

In the example above you could question if the image displayed should be defined as img but it’s a stock photograph and they decided to define it as a background image instead which is ok.

Note: <img> is a HTML tag but background-image is a CSS style that you use.

UI Controls

There are various UI controls that require some text to describe what it is.

For example, a button or form control.

A button is used to help complete a function. It could be a button that only has an icon and one that has text in the button. Both could be handled differently.

Using ARIA you can define ‘role=button’ but with standard HTML you can use the <button> tag. Which one should you use?

Here’s an example of a button which just has an X in it that requires us to create an ‘aria-label’ to describe what the button does.

<button aria-label=”Close” onclick=”myDialog.close()”>X</button>

Here’s a list of typical UI controls that you’ll need to test:

If you are using forms you need to make sure that each field is labeled correctly. Here’s an example of good labeling:

  <label for=”fname”>First name:</label><br>

  <input type=”text” id=”fname” name=”fname”><br>

  <label for=”lname”>Last name:</label><br>

  <input type=”text” id=”lname” name=”lname”>

</form>

Note: for forms you should also ensure:

• Clearly mark mandatory fields.  If a field is mandatory then it will also need to be labeled correctly in the html.
• There are instructions for the user (usually at the top of the form)
• Users get help when they make an error completing a form field (e.g. incorrect date format, this is what you need to enter).

Captcha

This can be very problematic depending on how it is implemented. For example, when pictures are shown and you are asked to identify which picture contains traffic lights!

We’ll review the implementation and make relevant suggestions.

Multimedia content

Video/Audio needs at least a description to identify what the video/audio is about.

Links

You want to make sure that links clearly stand out on the page (e.g. different colour) and that they use relevant anchor text and link description.

Guideline 1.2 – Time based media

This area is about catering for video and audio content that needs to be made more accessible.

Is there transcription available for pre-recorded audio only or video only?

Video transcription is the translation of your video’s audio into text. Transcription does not include audio information that describes things like visuals displayed in the video. This is handled separately.

Transcription tip!

Rev.com is a great service for creating captions/transcription for your audio/video. They even provide a live captioning service for Zoom video.

Are there captions available for pre-recorded audio?

Caption is a text that appears within the video to inform the user about what the person is saying.

Is there an audio description or media alternative (pre-recorded)?

When you are watching a video the captions may not be sufficient to describe what is shown within the video. This is where audio description is also required.

For example, an audio description could describe what’s happening in the background when someone is speaking so it gives users some context.

Here’s an example of transcription which includes audio description.

This is great for your website visitor but it’s also good for SEO!

Tip on selecting an accessible player:

You want to make sure the video player you use supports what is required for accessibility:

1. Supports closed captions
2. Audio description can be be toggled on/off
3. Keyword control can be used on the media player
4. Media player works on different devices and browsers
5. All controls are accessible.

Are there captions for live audio?

You generally won’t have any live video or audio content on your website but if you did then you’d need to have simultaneous caption creation so users see the captions displayed as the person speaks.

There are tools available to automatically caption your live video and audio.

Is there audio description for pre-recorded synchronized media?

This is for media that contains video and audio. We want audio information which accompanies the media.

Guideline 1.3 – Adaptable – Present information in a format that can be understood by software.

You need to ensure that what you can interpret visually by looking at something is programmatically described so that it can be interpreted correctly by software like screen readers.

Is there a logical structure to the content and is it is easy to understand the relationship with each piece of content within that structure?

When you view a web page you normally see headings, paragraphs, bolded content, tables etc. And when you view details of a table you see headings and you clearly see which row is relevant to which heading.

Here’s what you’ll need to review:

• Is content broken up into sub headings?
• Are lists, tables etc. used when appropriate?
• Is there correct HTML used for other structural elements throughout the content?
• Are there labels and alt text used as required (e.g. on forms?)

Tip

A good starting point is to test your website using a validator tool that checks for valid html (e.g. W3.org html validator).

Here’s an example of a form which displays required fields in red. This is ok for a visual user, but what about someone using a braille display?

To get over this problem the word ‘required’ is also added to the label for last name which is a required field.

<label for="lastname" class="required">Last name (required): </label>
<input id="lastname" type="text" size="25" value=""/>
<style type="text/css">
  .required {
    color:red;
  }
</style>

Is there a content order that make sense?

• When you view a web page you’ll see a navigation bar, then some content, headings, sub headings, paragraphs of text. You want to make sure this is presented in an order that makes sense.
• Use heading styles to indicate the importance of sections. You typically only have one <h1> style to identify the page of content and then you might have multiple H2, H3 etc.
• Have the navigation separate from the content (e.g. define navigation using <nav>)
• Use valid html

Here’s a typical structure of headings that make sense:

Can users understand the content when they can’t perceive shape, size or use information about spatial shape or size?

The easiest way to explain this is with an example:

Let’s say you have a comparison table of software product features and when a product has a feature then a diamond image is displayed in this column. This is not sufficient, you’ll need to add text to indicate what this diamond represents.

Does the website work well in portrait and landscape mode?

The website needs to be able to adapt to portrait or landscape mode without losing meaning.

If a website has implemented responsive design correctly then when you change orientation it adapts to a different viewport (i.e. selects a more suitable display based on the screen dimensions).

Are inputs to forms described correctly?

The purpose of this is to ensure that programmatically there is enough information about any field that needs to be completed in a form.

And if it’s possible enable auto fill so that the user doesn’t have to complete everything!

Can the purpose of elements on a page be figured out programmatically?

An example of this is using the ARIA ‘role’ element for sections of a website.

For example, a banner containing logo/company name etc. could be described as ‘role=banner’.

or using input labels on forms for email, name, address etc.

This is how you’d see this in HTML:

<input type=”email>

Is there a text version of any graph?

If there’s any graph type content you’ll want to have a table which summarizes what this content is about.

Guideline 1.4 – See and hear content

This is about making it easy for people to see and hear the content.

Are there text alternatives when colour is used to convey information?

Imagine you had a form and and a required field was displayed in red.

This doesn’t mean much to a screen reader!

But you could add the word ‘required’ onto the table as in the example below:

<label for=”lastname” class=”required”>Last name (required): </label> <input id=”lastname” type=”text” size=”25″ value=””/> <style type=”text/css”> .required { color:red; } </style>

Is there a mechanism to pause or stop the audio if it plays for more than 3 seconds?

If you are using a screen reader and a video automatically plays at the same time you’ll hear two voices!

Ideally, there will be no auto play of video which solves this issue.

If there is an auto play then make sure it’s less than 3 seconds and if it’s not, then make sure there’s a way to control the audio of the video playing.

Is there a good contrast between text and images/colour in the background?

We all know how important colours are in design and branding, but for the visually impaired visitors to your site, colours won’t make much of a difference to their experience.

For example, colour blind people won’t see a difference between red, orange, yellow, and green and you need to cater to them, too.

The key here is to be mindful of contrast ratio which is one of the most common accessibility issues found on websites.

Is there sufficient contrast between text colour and its background? A tool like colour contrast checker can help you find out!

The background colour is on the left and then the text colour is on the right.  The score is in the middle.

The recommendation is that the contrast is at least 4.5:1 or 3.1 when the text is large (e.g. 18 point or 14 point bold).

Also, make sure to use tools other than colour to communicate important content and information on your site.

For example, your main CTA usually pops out on the page due to a colour that makes users notice it. To make CTAs more accessible, you can use size, placement, boldness, contrast, to make them noticeable for people with colour blindness.

Can text be made larger and your website still function as normal?

An obvious one is just enlarging text on a screen to help someone with a visual impairment.

But you want the website to function as normal if a user increases the text size.

For example, when a user zooms in the text up to 400% you need to make sure that no information is lost.

Here’s an image from W3.org. I’m sure you don’t want your website to look like the one on the right when you enlarge text.

The WCAG 2.1 requirement is that you should be able to enlarge by 200% without any issues.

Are images of text avoided unless necessary?

You might have a logo which contains text (e.g. your company name) which is ok.

But what about images of text?

If you have an image of text you have to, at least, provide a label which describes it.

But you’re better off avoiding this type of images unless:

• It’s essential
• It’s customisable

Is the website responsive?

It’s normal to scroll down to see the full web page but not to scroll to the right or left.

When you move from a desktop to a smaller device the screen should automatically adjust so that you still don’t have to scroll to the right or left.

Is there sufficient contrast for non text content?

Adjacent colours need to have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1

This requirement is for people with relatively low vision.

Can spacing/line height be adjusted without any loss of performance?

• Line height (line spacing) should be at least 1.5 times the font size;
• Spacing following paragraphs should be at least 2 times the font size;
• Letter spacing (tracking) should be at least 0.12 times the font size;
• Word spacing should be at least 0.16 times the font size.

Is content displayed correctly on hover or focus?

When you focus on an element (e.g. tab to it) or hover over it you see additional content.

For example, you hover over a button and a popup appears.

…or a sub menu is displayed.

This content needs to be:

Dismissable – For example, if you click Escape the content is not displayed any more.

Hoverable – When you hover over the content the content is displayed as long as the mouse is over the trigger.

Persistent – This is a combination of both. The content remains visible until the user dismisses it, the user moves the mouse away or the content no longer contains important information.

Note: This does not apply to when a HTML element such as a title is displayed when you hover over something (e.g. an image).

Is the font readable?

Some font/typefaces are more readable that others. There is preference towards serif or sans serif but that is not mandatory. They key part is that it’s readable.

2. Operable

This means users need to be able to use the navigation and the user interface by interacting with it. For example, they can ‘operate’ the user interface using the keyboard.

Guideline 2.1 – Keyboard accessible

Many users use a keyboard instead of a mouse or trackpad, including users with mobility accessibility barriers or those using a screen reader.

This is why all functionality on your website must be accessible via keyboard – links, buttons, forms, and other controls.

Is everything accessible via a keyboard?

Now is the time to stop using your mouse and use your keyboard only.

You’re checking:

Does everything follow a logical order going forward or backwards (using tab to go forward and shift tab to go back).

When you are on a particular button, section etc. do you see that this element is highlighted? In the following example, it’s obvious we’ve tabbed to ‘articles’.

Is everything accessible using the tab key and when you press enter when you have focus does it activate the action?

Note: If a popup appears you need to be able to navigate this also.

Can you skip the header?

When you are using a screen reader you don’t want it to read out the same header on every page. That would drive you insane. So you should be able to tab to the ‘Skip to content link,’ press enter and then your next tab will skip that section.

When you click tab when you first arrive on the website below, you are on the ‘Skip to content’ link. If you press enter you go straight to the content.

If you press a second tab you move to the ‘Skip to navigation’ link. If you press enter on this you are brought to the navigation.

If you press tab again you move to ‘skip to navigation’. If you select this you jump directly to navigation.

If there’s a character, punctuation, number or symbol used as a shortcut there must be a way to disable or change this shortcut to one or more non printable characters. The only other exception is when the shortcut is only available when the element has focus.

2.1.2 Are there any situations where you hit a dead end with the keybord (a keyboard trap)?

You tab your way to a place on the website and you can’t tab forward or backwards.

This is known as a keyboard trap. As the song goes…caught in a trap, can’t look back….

Is there an alternative to a keyboard shortcut implemented using a letter?

Having a character key shortcut with someone that relies on a keyboard for navigation is not good because they may end up pressing it by mistake.

So we need to provide an alternative.

a) Ability to remap this character to another shortcut

b). Turn it off

c). It’s only active when you have focus on this. So that means if you use the shortcut nothing happens unless you are actually on it!

Guideline 2.2 – Enough time

Imagine if you set a time limit on completing a form but only considered users without accessibility needs. This time limit may be too short.

Is timing adjustable?

Switching off the timing is ideal, but being able to extend it (i.e. when the time limit is nearly reached) or adjust it to the new time is ok.

Can the website user pause, stop or hide moving, blinking or auto updating content?

If it’s moving/blinking or scolling and it:

a). starts automatically

b). lasts more than 5 seconds

c). is presented in parallel with other content

Then there’s a mechanism for pause, stop or delete.

Same issue with auto updating content.

Guideline 2.3 – Seizures and physical reactions

This guideline is to make sure that nothing is designed that could cause a seizure or physical reaction.

Do ‘flashes’ on the screen meet the guidelines?

Rule number one is avoid any flashing objects but if that is not possible then make sure it doesn’t flash more than 3 times in any one second or flash below the general or red flash thresholds.

Guideline 2.4 – Navigable

This is about making it easy to navigate through the website.

Can you skip over repeating blocks?

Imagine using a screen reader and every time it gets to a new page it reads out the navigation. Now that wouldn’t be fun. So you need to be able to skip these. I gave an example of this earlier.

Are all pages titled correctly?

You need good descriptive titles on all pages. This is good for accessibility but also good for SEO.

You can use Screaming Frog to look at page titles all in one place:

Does the focus order preserve meaning?

If you are tabbing through the content but you tab in an order that doesn’t make sense you’ll need to fix this.

Can you determine the purpose of the link from the link text?

‘Click here’ is not a very helpful anchor text. You need to have words that describe the content that the link is going to.

What is anchor text?

When you are linking to another page on your website or an external website the anchor text is the visible text you see that is related to the page you are sending people to. Instead of just showing the link it’s better to show the actual text.

Is there more than one way to locate a web page?

Here are some examples:

• Sitemap – Have a list of all pages on a sitemap
• Quick links – Have quick links to get to important pages
• Search – Search to find a relevant page

Is keyboard focus visible?

The question says it all! This was also covered in one of the earlier guidelines. When you tab to somewhere you need to be able to visually see the focus is in that area.

Are header, body and footer clearly defined?

Assistive technologies need to be able to clearly identify header, footer and body. There are html tags which define these areas.

Guideline 2.5 Input modalities

This guideline is about newer interfaces where you may not use a keyboard or mouse to navigate. For example on smartphones you can swipe, pinch and zoom, tap etc.

Can functionality using multipoint or path based gestures be operated by a single pointer without using the gesture (unless essential)?

A path based gesture is where you need to move in specific path. For example, you swipe up to access certain functionality or down to access other. A multi-point gesture is where you use two or more points of contact to access functionality e.g. use 2 fingers to pinch and zoom.

Is there an easy way to get out of an action that has been initiated by a single pointer?

What’s a single pointer?

This is where you can access functionality with one point of interaction with a screen e.g. tap, click, long press etc.

At least one of the following must be true:

• No down event – the trigger is implemented when you press down on a button
• Abort or Undo – You use an up event (i.e. function is enabled when the pointer is released) and there’s a way of aborting. For example, you are pressing on something with your finger and instead of lifting your finger up straight you slide it to another part of the screen and the functionality is aborted.
• Up reversal – The up event reverses the down event
• Essential – Completing the function of the down event is essential.

Does the visible label of a component match the programmatic name of that component?

If a sighted user uses text to speech the programmatic name will be read out and it’s a better experience if this matches the visible label.

Can functionality that is operated by motion or gesturing also be operated by other UI controls?

If you shake or tilt something to control it can you use another UI control to access this functionality?

Understandable

This is about making sure the language used on the page is understandable.

3.1 Readable

We cover the following:

Can the language of the page or sections of the page be programmatically determined?

You should see something like this at the start of any page. ‘Lang’ indicates the language of the page.

<html class=”ie ie7″ lang=”en-US”>

If the language changes on the page you’ll need to be able to identify this also.

3.2 Predictable

You want your UI to perform in a predictable way, no surprises!

Is navigation in the same order on pages?

The navigation position on one page should be the same on all other pages unless the user makes a change to the navigation.

Are components, images etc. named consistently across pages?

If you have an image on one page and have the same image on another page then you want the image to be named the same.

If you have several pages of a post and you name the pages page 1, page 2, page 3 that is consistent. Labeling does not have to be the same if it doesn’t make sense but it does have to be consistent.

3.3 Input Assistance

This is about helping users avoid or recover from mistakes:

Input error – If you’re typing in something incorrectly you might visually see it’s wrong but there also needs to be text identifying the issue.

Labels – When users have to enter a text there is an associated label describing the field.

Input error – If a user makes an error then there is a suggestion on how to fix it.

Error prevention – You should be able to either reverse, get some feedback about the error or have the ability to confirm before you submit.

4. Robust

In addition to being accessible, your content needs to support a variety of browsers, technologies etc.

Guideline 4.1 Compatible

This involves testing with a variety of user agents and assistive technologies. A good initial test for this is using the W3C markup validation tool to see if there are any errors (i.e. it validates that the structure/syntax of html, xhml etc is correct).

Here’s an example of the output:

Also you need to test against multiple browsers to make sure content is loaded correctly.

And it’s also worth loading the page in a text only browser (such as Lynx).

Can all the data be parsed correctly?

Is there proper start and end tags within sections of the content so it’s easy to identify where a section starts and ends?

Are elements nested correctly?

Are there duplicate attributes or id’s that make it hard to distinguish elements?

Can all user interface controls be understood by assistive technologies?

Here are some examples of controls and what you need to be able to figure out:

• Checkbox – is it checked or not?
• Focus – What element has focus and can this be programmatically understood (not just visually)?

Are users made aware of status messages that are not given focus in a way that doesn’t necessarily interrupt work?

Imagine if you were browsing a page and while on that page a banner came across the top of the website announcing a sale.

Are forms designed in the right way?

To make forms accessible, you’ll want to ensure that the following is enabled:

• Ability to use tab to navigate through the form
• Ability to use tab to navigate through the form

<form>

  <label for=”fname”>First name:</label><br>

  <input type=”text” id=”fname” name=”fname”><br>

  <label for=”lname”>Last name:</label><br>

  <input type=”text” id=”lname” name=”lname”>

</form>

• Clearly marked mandatory fields.  If a field is mandatory then it will also need to be labeled correctly in the html.
• There are instructions for the user (usually at the top of the form)
• Users get help when they make an error completing a form field (e.g. incorrect date format, this is what you need to enter).

Summary

As you can see, there’s a lot to of ground to cover when running a comprehensive accessibility audit. However, it all pays off and the benefits it brings to your business are many – from building a positive brand image to reaching a broader audience and improving your SEO.

The post How to perform an accessibility audit for WCAG compliance appeared first on RazorSocial.

As Google is going to give a ranking boost to websites that are fast you are probably keen to understand more about Google PageSpeed insights?

…And I’m not surprised because it’s confusing!

This article will help.

Why is website page speed important?

Google wants to provide the best possible user experience to users.

If your website is slow it will frustrate the users and create a bad user experience. It’s simple as that. Performance impacts experience.

Google recently announced that the core web vitals will be used as part of their ranking algorithm in 2021. These core web vitals are indicators of speed and how quickly people can interact with your page.

Basically for this table below you can’t be ‘red’

What is Google PageSpeed Insights?

It’s a free tool provided by Google that allows you to enter a web page URL and quickly run a test to check the various metrics related to performance.

The tool then gives your page a score ranging from 0 to 100 points. The score is not really about speed. You can an improved score if you’ve used the typical recommendations from Google about improving speed.

It also shows you the exact parameters that are slowing your page down as well as suggestions on how to make it better.

This is where things get technical and the results a little difficult to understand.

How do you interpret the results?

The first thing you see after running a test is the performance score (desktop and mobile) for the analyzed page.

This will be a number between 0 and 100.

• 0 to 49 – This is bad, you don’t want your score to be 49 or under
• 50 to 89 – This is ok but room for improvement
• 90 to 100 – If you’re in this scale you’re in the good books.

As you scroll down you’ll see what is causing a high or low score:

Note: See colour indicators before each section:

• Green means fast
• Orange means moderate
• Red means slow

This is what each of these sections mean:

First ContentFul Paint

This is the time it takes from navigation to a page from the browser to the time when the content starts to render.

Basically, it’s an indicator that the page is starting to load.

For example, it could be just a colour change which is the background colour of the page, an image displayed or a piece of text.

This is important because when a user sees some action they are more likely to wait around until the page is fully loaded.

Guideline:

Time to interactive

This parameter shows how fast a page becomes interactive.

This means page showing sufficient elements on the screen so that users can actually interact with it e.g. click a menu button.

At times, websites can focus on visibility i.e. getting everything displayed before you can interact with the content which may be frustrating to the user.

Guideline:

Total Blocking Time

There’s a gap between the time your website visitor sees content on the screen and the time that they can interact with it.

This is the total blocking time!

It’s good to know if people can’t do things like mouse click, screen taps or keyword presses before the website is interactive.

Long tasks are tasks that block you for more than 50ms.

Anything over 50ms is considered blocking time.

If there are no long tasks then you’ll see 0 blocking time which is what you see in the stats above.

Cumulative Layout Shift

A layout shift is when a visual element is displayed on the screen but then moves.

So for example, you’re reading the news and there’s a layout shift so the location where the news article is has changed.

This is unexpected behavior from a user’s perspective.

The higher the score the worse it is.

Speed Index

This is a tricky one to understand but a valuable one.

So imagine 2 websites that both loaded in 1.5 seconds.

If you browsed the 2 websites shown in the above image, which one would load faster?

Both fully loaded in 1.5 seconds but because the first site started showing some elements earlier on, it appeared to be faster to the user.

If you just measure the time to load they are the same.

Speed index is a calculated score based on how ‘fast’ a website fully loads.

A video recording of the load is used to show visually when bits are loaded.

At various intervals the amount of content visible on the screen (above the fold) is compared to content displayed on a fully loaded website to work out the percentage of content displayed for that particular time.

This process is repeated a few times.

The time is only based on what the user can seen on the screen (the viewport). It does not matter what is below the fold.

So…it’s good to try with different viewports.

If you have 2 websites and one shows visual elements before the other it will end up with a lower speed index score.

The lower the better.

Largest Contentful paint

This is the time it takes for the largest element of the page to fully render.

As the page loads the first element becomes the largest element but this is replaced as larger elements are added.

The last element of a page could be the largest element of the page (e.g. a large image) or may not be.

Note: we’re not talking how much space it takes up on the screen.

Here are 2 examples.

The time from when the website started to display to the time the last image on the page was displayed would be considered the largest contentful paint. This is because the image takes up the most real estate on the page!

But…

In the case below the ‘Instagram’ image was the largest image displayed so the largest contentful paint is when the second last screen was loaded.

The last screen is discounted. All that was added to that screen was the ‘Google play button’ which was a smaller image than the ‘Instagram’ one.

According to Google, if you want to provide good user experience LCP should happen within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

Guideline:

Opportunities

The Opportunities section shows you the suggestions that could help improve page loading time.

Each suggestion also shows you estimated reduction in load time for the page if you implemented the recommendation.

Diagnostics

Diagnostics highlights best practices in web development that you should consider implementing.

However, even if you make these improvements they won’t directly impact your page Performance score.

Summary

Improving your website speed is all about providing visitors with a better experience. Having a site that loads quickly makes both users and search engines happier, but it also impacts your ability to convert visitors into customers.

A tool like Google PageSpeed Insights is incredibly useful because it shows you where to start and which issues to focus on to boost your website performance.

Hopefully this article helped you understand how this tool works and what the test results actually mean so you can start optimizing your web pages to create an amazing experience for your visitors.

The post How to analyze results from Google PageSpeed Insights appeared first on RazorSocial.

If you are using your website as a channel for sales, then most of your digital marketing game revolves around building traffic to your site.

But…not all traffic has the same weight since each visitor to your website doesn’t have the same level of familiarity with your business.

One important factor to website sales depends on understanding that there are different types of traffic and that you need to adapt your offer to each.

This is why savvy digital marketers plan their campaigns around traffic temperature.

So, what exactly is traffic temperature?

Have a look at this:

Traffic temperature is about the type of audience that you are interacting with and the likelihood that they will buy your products or services.

It makes sense that a happy customer is much more likely to buy from you than someone that has never heard about your business before.

Imagine if you had a shop on the High Street and a regular customer came through the door. You’d have to spend a lot less time and effort to get them to buy from you than someone that visits your shop for the first time.

The same is true for online sales.

It’s all about taking into consideration different knowledge levels website visitors have of your business and your products or services.

So, in order to get the most out of cold, warm, and hot traffic, you need to apply marketing tactics specific to each traffic type.

Cold Traffic

Cold traffic are website visitors that have never heard about your brand before. You’ve had no previous interactions so they still don’t have any knowledge or opinion formed about your business.

They most likely landed on your website while doing research on a specific problem or need that they have and they may not even be looking for a solution yet.

If you try to sell to them right of the bat, you’re going to have a hard time converting this traffic.

Let me put it this way… Would you walk up to someone on the street without even introducing yourself first and ask them out on a date?

I highly doubt it because you know what the answer would be. You need to give someone a chance to get to know you first.

It’s the same with cold traffic. The good news is that this is the biggest audience you can target because there are a lot more people that don’t know about you than those that do!

However, cold traffic is also the most expensive traffic to target.

Why?

Because you’ll need to do a bit of education first to convince a cold audience to buy from you. And you’ll need to do this gradually and gain their trust so that they become a warm audience.

So, how do you ensure that you convert a good percentage of your cold traffic at some point in the future?

You build a relationship with this audience by doing one or more of the following:

• Provide awesome content. Target cold traffic with ads that take them to your best presales content that provides immediate value and start slowly building trust.
• Get social. Invite them to follow your brand on social media so they can get to know your business better. This also gives you an opportunity to to monitor their behavior with a tracking pixel and then show more relevant ads.
• Get into their inbox. Start with a micro conversion and get cold audience to opt in to your email list. The best way to do this is with a lead magnet – a free and relevant offer in the form of a guide, checklist, industry report, or similar. Once in their inbox, you can deliver relevant content, be helpful, and earn their trust until they warm up.

Warm Traffic

This is the audience that knows about you and hopefully likes what you do. They’ve shown some interest in your business and your product but aren’t quite ready to buy from you yet.

They need a bit of convincing that your company is trustworthy and that they’ll get the most value for their money by doing business with you vs. your competitors.

A warm audience could be:

• An active social media follower
• A repeat visitor to your site
• An engaged email subscriber (opens emails, clicks on links, etc.)
• A webinar participant, etc.

So, how do you bring your warm audience closer to a decision to buy?

With warm traffic you have more information on visitor behavior on your website and more insight into their likes and interests. This enables you to retarget them with highly relevant ads that take them to pages they’ll find valuable.

Let’s say you were selling event management software.

If someone downloads a guide that talks about key features of event planning technology, this shows their interest in software that can improve their event planning process.

You can then run ads with an offer for a free software trial, giving them an option to take your product for a test drive before making a decision to buy.

Depending on their previous actions and interests, you can retarget warm audience with ads for free consultations or free trial, or you can further build trust with social proof content content like testimonials, case studies, etc.

The goal here is to engage warm audience and showcase your product’s strengths without asking for their credit card.

Hot Traffic

Hot traffic refers to audience that you’ve already converted i.e. happy customers as well as people who have shown serious interest in buying and need just a little a push in the right direction to make a decision.

Many articles online define hot traffic only as customers.

But….

…you may have many unhappy customers and you can’t expect them to buy from you again.

So hot audience are your satisfied customers that are likely to refer business to you.

If you survey your customers with Net Promoter Score surveys, the Promoters are likely to be your hot audience…

Hot prospects can also be people who:

• Visited your offer page and started the booking process but didn’t complete it
• Bought the offer from you but you have a chance to up-sell them immediately with another offer
• Bought more than one product from you in the past in a similar range.

In any case, with hot traffic there is a huge opportunity to either maximize profit by selling more to your existing customers or to reactivate them by reminding them you’re still around.

With a hot customer you’d send them directly to your landing page with the offer or even send them directly to a booking page. If they are familiar with your offer already you could summarise it in the email and then send them directly to the checkout page!

If they have already bought you could get them to take another action…

• Up-sell them with a higher-priced product
• Cross-sell a complimentary item as a part of their purchase.
• Provide fidelity offers as part of your loyalty program to turn them into your brand promoters.

Takeaways

Digital marketing is all about presenting the right offers at the right time which enables you to shorten the buyer’s journey and optimize marketing costs. Understanding the difference between cold, warm, and hot traffic and how to target each type helps you achieve this while maximizing your website sales.

The post How Traffic Temperature Can Affect Your Website Sales appeared first on RazorSocial.

“I need a new website” is not the requirements your agency is looking for!

What happens with that spec is that neither of you will be happy with the end result.

So….

….You need to step back and do a good bit of work before you chuck it over the fence to the agency.

And that bit of work is called a website brief.

A website brief is a document which describes in detail what you want. 

And yes….

Of course you still want help from a good web development agency that will give you input but you need to start off with a specification that you can send out the multiple agencies to get comparable quotes.

Ready?

Let’s go through what you should include in your website brief.

 1. Goals of your website

What do you want the website to deliver when it’s finished? 

Maybe you have an entirely new set of goals for your new website or you just want to improve on the existing ones. 

Either way, when you are creating goals for your website brief, make sure they are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely). 

Here’s an example of a SMART goal: 

Our goal is to generate 25 leads per week by the end of 2020.

When you have a measurable goal you can set up relevant analytics to track these goals.

Outline about 3 to 5 specific measurable goals you want to achieve with the new website.

 2. Target audience

Your product or service certainly isn’t for everyone, neither should your website be. You need to be very precise about who you target audience is so that your new website can address their needs, interests and preferences.

You want to get into the details by creating customer personas and outlining how these idealized representations of your customers would behave on your website. 

Likely questions:

What would they look for? What information do they need to make a decision? How would they expect to complete certain actions on your website? What appeals to them aesthetically? What is their intent and how can your website fulfill it? 

The less room you leave for guessing, the more likely you’ll get the website that resonates with your target audience, both visually and verbally.

This is the only way to ensure that your new website will deliver a great user experience that results in conversions. 

3. Competition & other websites

It’s good for the Agency to know your competition.

They will analyse their websites to see what they are doing well and not so well.

From an SEO perspective they will review them to see what links they are getting from high authority domains that you don’t have and much more!

You may also provide a list of other websites you like and outline why you like them.

This will give agencies an idea of what style you like. If you’re not sure then just leave it to the agency.

4. Branding

You may already have core visual brand elements (logo, color palette, typography) developed and you want your agency to do a small facelift, or you may want a complete redesign of your brand’s visual identity. 

In any case, you need to clearly explain the look and feel you’re looking to achieve with the new website. You also need to briefly summarize your brand personality and how you’d like that to be communicated visually. But keep in mind that you’re also paying for the creative capacity of the agency you’re working with, so you should be open to hearing their suggestions for visually representing your brand.  

5. Design 

When it comes to the design section of your brief, it’s always useful to do some research and prepare examples of the websites that you like. You may like the overall visual feel of some websites, while others will capture your attention with design details or something specific they’re doing particularly well.  

It’s important that you provide notes on what you think makes these sites successful so they can serve as reference points for the Web agency. 

WARNING: I have worked with companies who said they liked a design which is totally unsuitable for their business. So you may need your agency to work with you on this.

It is also useful to include design directions for the graphic elements you want on your website. For example, if you want custom illustrations or icons designed, you need to make this clear in your brief. 

6. Content and Menu

You need to think about all the different pages you want on the website and what you want on these pages.

  Ideally you write out all the main sections you think you need on each page.

Based on your findings, you can propose the navigation structure for the new website by creating a navigation flowchart.

If you’d like the agency to create the new navigation structure, make that clear in the brief and provide the current website’s navigation path analysis data to the agency.  

A really useful tool for creating this structure is Gloomaps

7. Functionality

What functionality do you need built for this website. This is where the costs start adding up and it’s very easy to have your costs hiked up during the project if you don’t list out everything.

For example.

Imagine if you were a tourism attraction. What type of functionality may you need?

• Integration with a booking engine – This could be as simple as adding one line of code on your website to display the booking engine or it could a few days work doing integration with an API (techie term but all I mean is that you building your own checkout process and this talks to the booking engine instead of putting their booking engine on the website).
• Integration with your email provider – This is quite straight forward but if you want to add email subscription to your website you’ll need this.
• An online shop – You probably won’t get this built from scratch but your developer will use something like Woocommerce and customise this to suit your needs.
• Schema markup – The developer can add additional information to pages on your website that will help Google display more relevant information in search results.
• The Hotel wants to run events so needs functionality for people to be able to register and get automatic notifications of any events.

When you are doing any integration with any 3rd party software this is where the costs start adding up!

8. Copywriting

A good copy is equally important as good design and it’s one of the most important tools for engaging your website audience and driving conversions.

Words sell!!!

If you have your copy ready at the outset of the project this will help the agency inform their design decisions and also provide insight into your website offerings and its overall purpose. 

However….

…..if you require the agency to write the website copy for you, you will need to specify this in your brief and provide information about your business, your brand, and your product/service that will serve as a basis for creating your website copy. 

9. Media – Imagery/Video

Create a list with all the visual materials you want to use on the website e.g. photos, videos. If you’re providing all of this material, make sure it is high quality. 

If not, you will need to decide whether you want your chosen agency to take photographs and create videos for you and write clear expectations for the visual content. 

10. Localisation

Localisation is about changing your website to suit different countries.

You may not have requirements in this area but if you do you need to list them out.

Here is an example of some of the issues you need to consider:

• Translation – Translating the content to a different language
• Localising the language – For example, in the US they mainly speak english but the spelling is different than the UK or Ireland. Also, phrasing could be different. For example, in Ireland when someone says ‘deadly’ this means its great. But it definitely doesn’t mean that in every country!!
• Currency – Presenting the offers in the local currency
• Adjusting the layout – The layout of the screens may be different. For example, some countries have much longer words to describe the same thing in another language so you’ll find that some text does not display correctly.
• Presentation of content – In some countries they write left to right and others is right to left.
• Imagery/video – Some images/video would be perfectly acceptable in one country and completely unacceptable in other countries.

11. Your Funnels

No matter how well your website is designed and how great your copy is, you’ll find it difficult to convert visitors into leads without marketing funnels. We talked about goals earlier and funnels are your ultimate tool for achieving your website goals. 

You may not know enough about funnels but it’s an important requirement for your business so you need to outline what is the typical process for people buying from you.

Once you have this in place your Agency can tease this out and start mapping out any sales funnels.

12. Analytics

A proper set up of website analytics tools is crucial for the success of your new website.

You just want to make it clear up front with the agency what you want tracked. For example:

• Conversions and conversion rate
• Abandonment rate – people starting the booking process and dropping out
• Sales generated
• Email conversion rates
• General issues with your website

A combination of Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and Google Search Console will cover these issues but there will be set up required and if you don’t ask for the above you probably won’t get it.

13 SEO

You’ll want your existing website migrated over to the new website without losing any traffic and you’ll probably want an evaluation of your existing content so it can be optimised to drive more traffic.

A migration from one website to another needs to be handled carefully because it’s very easy to lose traffic.

Your web agency will need to have a specialist in SEO.

i.e. You don’t want a developer that does SEO, you want someone that only does SEO!

14. Other

Here are some additional requirements that you need to outline in your brief: 

Speed

The speed of the website is the measure of how fast the content on your pages loads and it is an increasingly important factor to consider both for desktop and mobile versions of your website. 

Page speed is one of Google’s ranking factors and it’s also important for user experience. So, make sure you outline your expectations for website speed in your brief. Ideally, you’ll want your pages to fully load in under 3 seconds.

The agency needs to know this so they can optimize your website for speed by writing clean code, optimizing images, and leveraging other best practices for building high-performing websites. 

Browser support

Make sure to outline your requirements regarding browser compatibility of your new website. You’ll want all the website features accessible on popular browsers on desktop and mobile.

List the current and previous versions of the browsers you want supported e.g. Google Chrome, Firefox, iOS 10 to iOS 11, Android 7.0 to Android 8.1, etc. 

Accessibility

It’s important to make your new website accessible to as many users as possible, regardless of ability or context. Your agency should know your requirements for accessibility from the start so they can optimize the design of your website accordingly. 

Security

Make sure that the agency knows you want an SSL certificate for the new website. This is the minimum requirement for making your website secure and avoid being flagged by Google. 

You also need to plan for disaster recovery and outline your requirements for website backup. Another thing to consider is listing any plugins that you want installed to ensure your new website is secure.

A good example is Wordfence plugin for WordPress sites which scans your website for any security issues and acts as a firewall to prevent it from being hacked. 

Hosting

Most agencies can either host your website for you or make a hosting recommendation.

An Agency could build a super fast website that is slow because you have it running on slow shared servers (i.e. a cheap hosting package).

You just need to mention you want the Agency to evaluate your hosting and make recommendations. If you don’t have a CDN (content distribution network) you need one. A CDN just means that people in different countries around the world will access the site faster.

15. Maintenance

What about after your website is launched? Who will update the new website? If you want your agency to do it, you need to specify your maintenance expectations in the brief, including things like which elements need to be updated regularly. 

Maintaining a website is very important to keep it secure and functioning optimally, so if you’ll need ongoing support from the agency, this needs to be communicated in the brief. 

16. Budget and payment terms

Cost overruns happen quite often in website projects where items in the brief are not discussed openly. If you set your budget in advance, make sure there’s some breathing room in it so you can make adjustments based on the expectations outlined in your brief. 

In this section of the brief you should also specify your payment terms i.e. if you’ll make the payment in advance or in instalments (for example, half up front and half at the end of the project), the currency in which the payment will be made, how you’ll transfer the funds (e.g. wire transfer), etc. 

I would not agree to terms that meant all money was paid before the website is live and you are happy. Don’t skip over these payment terms, make sure to negotiate them.

Getting your website brief reviewed

Before you hand over the brief to an Agency you should get an independent review. 

This is especially important if you have indicated some designs you like but don’t really know a lot about design!

Takeaways 

Writing a website brief that covers all grounds may seem like a lot of work to you now, but it is absolutely worth it.

Being clear and going into details about your requirements will ensure that you receive an equally clear proposal from the agency.

You’ll be able to kick off the project on time and save a lot of time (and money) that you’d otherwise spend going back and forth with the agency until they’re clear on your website goals and requirements. 

The post How to Clarify Your Website Requirements with a Website brief appeared first on RazorSocial.

Over the last few months we’ve done website audits for over 50 businesses and we saw a lot of common issues. 

Here are 17 possible issues with your website you could solve pretty easily:

1. Doesn’t pass the 5 second test

When someone lands on your website you only have a few seconds to capture their attention.

Within the first 5 seconds, can a visitor figure out where they are, what they can do on your site, and why they should do it?

It’s important that you communicate these things ‘above the fold’ or the area of your website that users see without scrolling down the page. This is typically your hero image and accompanying content. 

I’ve been studying the Storybrand framework recently which helps you understand how storytelling can fit into your website. One of the things that this framework promotes is having a clear tagline on your website that sets the scene and is so simple that anyone can understand. 

We’re in the middle of changing our tagline as a result of this!!

Your tagline should indicate what you do and how your customers’ lives will be different after they buy from you.

Then you need a very clear call to action. 

Here’s an example:

The tagline in the example above addresses the company’s value proposition and is followed by one main action they want people to take.

This way, visitors to the website don’t have to scroll down to look for information on what the company offers and what they can do next.

2. Analytics and/or Google Search Console not setup

Without the analytics set up you can get a good idea of your performance by counting the cash you collect through your website.

But….

… most websites are not cash machines so whatever money you are generating you can improve.

Your analytics tells the story of how your website is performing and not having analytics set up is like not bothering to do accounts for your business!!

Everyone hates doing accounts but we know it’s essential.

Similarly, without Google Search Console set up, you won’t be able to track and measure your site’s search traffic and performance or uncover any issues with your website pages.

Google Search Console is a report that Google shares with you on how your website is doing.  Surely you want to see this?

So, make sure to do the proper setup of your website analytics. This article can help:

Are you sure your website analytics is set up correctly?

3. Not enough focus on conversion optimization

Conversion rate optimisation is a practice of getting the highest possible number of people visiting your site to take the action you want them to take.

CRO is a very complex field as there are many things that impact visitors’ decision making, from visual hierarchy and content layout, to copy and the way you use CTAs on your website.

Here we’re going to shed light on some of the most common issues with conversion optimisation.

Not making your primary call to action obvious

Your primary call to action is what you really want people to do. For example ‘Buy now,’ ‘Enquire now’ etc. 

You want your primary CTA to clearly stand out and ideally it will be visible in the same place across your website pages. Normally this is the top right of a website:

Not giving people a secondary call to action

Not everyone is ready to buy now. In the example above the business wants everyone to ‘Try Canary’ but if they are not ready to sign up yet they can download the pricing.

A secondary CTA gives you an opportunity to build the relationship with website visitors over email and nurture them until they are ready to buy.

Do you provide a primary and secondary call to action? And is there a clear distinction between them?

Not analyzing your conversion statistics

It’s rare to find a company that can tell you what the conversion rates are on their website.

And this is one of the most important things to know! If you run an online shop you are more likely to know these stats but it’s just as important for every other business.

So you need to set up your goals and funnels to measure your conversion rate and figure out where people are dropping off on their path to conversion and why.

Here’s some useful links to help you with goals and funnel setup:

How to Build a Google Analytics Funnel to Track your Sales

How to Set Up Google Analytics Goals and Score More Conversions!

4.  Website Mistake: SEO issues that are easily resolved

When was the last time you did a review of your SEO to identify some basic issues that need fixing? For example:

• Missing, duplicate or invalid SEO titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags. Every page on your website should have a unique and descriptive title and description that Google can ‘read’ to help it index your pages correctly. Likewise, you need to have alt tags for images describing what the images are about. Most SEO tools now let you analyze your website for issues with meta tags and these are easy fixes that can bring you tangible SEO gains.
• Broken links on your site. Broken links negatively impact user experience on your site but they also damage your SEO rankings. In our experience, a surprisingly small number of website owners are willing to spend their time to do link analysis and fix or remove broken links. With tools like Ahrefs, you can find broken internal and external backlinks on your site in a matter of minutes.
• Pages missing on your site. This issue most commonly happens after a website redesign when you don’t put correct redirects in place. So if you are deleting old pages you need to redirect them to appropriate new pages that provide related content. If you don’t do this, users will end up on 404 pages which is a frustrating experience for them. In addition, Google doesn’t index pages that return a 404 status.

5. Inconsistent branding

Visual identity is a big part of your overall brand and it includes a logo, colour palettes, typefaces, icon’s, style of pictures, etc. All of these elements need to be used consistently throughout your website since a strong and consistent visual identity will go a long way in communicating your brand to your audience.

So what are some of the most common visual brand identity issues we find on websites?

• Different styles of images used throughout the website
• Inconsistent use of logo e.g. using two different versions of the logo
• No consistency in the use of colors
• Different graphics styles from page to page, etc.

These issues create an impression that very little attention was given to the development of the brand’s visual identity. Not to mention the effect they have on the overall visual appeal of the website. So, make sure the core elements of your site’s visual identity are used consistently and get help from a designer to fix any issues that you identify.

Check out this detailed guide on building visual identity from Canva:

20 actionable tips to build a winning visual brand identity

6. No pixel tracking setup

Tracking pixels are a very useful tool for building audiences that are more receptive to your marketing message. If you ever felt like a company is ‘following you’ around the Web with their ads, then this was a tracking pixel at work!

A tracking pixel is an HTML code snippet which is loaded when a user visits your website or specific pages on your site. It enables you to build an audience that has already shown some interest in your company and your product so that you can target them with relevant ads.

This is important because ad campaigns targeted towards these audiences typically have higher conversion rates than those targeting a brand new audience.

So, for example, by inserting a Facebook pixel in your website you can build a custom audience and use it to remarket to people who already took a specific action on your site.

Apart from advertising purposes, tracking pixels are also used for analytics i.e. you’ll want to have Google Analytics tag on your website to track user behavior.  Although this may seem too technical, setting up tracking pixels with Google Tag Manager is actually quite easy to do.

Check out this step by step guide on how to use GTM to set up tracking pixels on your website:

How to Use Google Tag Manager

7.  Website not secure

Although Google has been penalizing unsecure websites for quite some time now, many businesses still don’t have an SSL Secure Website. It even shows all non-SSL websites as “Not Secure”.

So, why is this important? A HTTPS designation on the URL shows visitors that your website has been verified as authentic. It also gives them assurance that you’re encrypting any data they submit to your site. And if you’re selling anything on your website, you are required to have encryption!

A secure website is a must if you want to have a professional web presence and establish credibility with visitors. If you still don’t have an SSL certificate and you were worried about additional costs, now you can get it for free from sites like Let’s Encrypt. 

8. Poor website copy

Good website copy helps your visitors make a decision to take an action on your site e.g. contact you, make a purchase, etc. It plays a huge role in driving conversion by speaking to the needs and interests of your target audience at different stages of their journey. Plus, great website copy also communicates your brand and its values.

It’s not easy to create compelling copy and that’s why professional copywriters are employed to do it. They know how to develop brand voice and tone and how to use it consistently; they also know when and how to use different persuasive copywriting techniques to drive visitors to purchase.

Unfortunately, many websites don’t have professionally written copy and that impacts the results they get in terms of user engagement and conversion.

When was the last time you reviewed your website copy? And how do you know your copy solid, anyway? Here are some signs that you are doing a good job in this area:

• The tone and style of writing is consistent throughout your website
• You communicate your value proposition clearly and it’s evident to visitors from the moment they land on your site
• You’ve tested your headlines and CTAs and the ones you have now resonate most with your visitors
• The copy on each page of your website is easy to scan – you’re using short paragraphs, bullets, and headings to increase readability
• The copy is focused on the benefits to your target customers and they’re the hero of the story. So, you’re using more of ‘you’ and ‘your’ in the text that ‘we’ and ‘our,’ etc.
• You provide content for visitors of different levels of knowledge about your business and your product – you have copy that engages people who’re visiting your site for the first time to learn more, but you also have copy targeted at those who are closer to the decision to buy from you.
• The copy is written with SEO in mind i.e. you’re using keywords naturally in the text and linking internally to other relevant pages on your site.

9. No clear blogging strategy

Running a blog and updating it regularly with content around your target keywords and topics that are valuable to your potential customers will help rank your pages and drive more relevant traffic.

With so much talk about the importance of content, you’d think that in 2020 most businesses with an online presence would have a clear blogging strategy. But unfortunately that is not the case.

Typically, websites have issues with publishing frequency (quantity of content) or with writing about topics relevant to their target audience (quality of content).

According to a research from HubSpot, the more often you publish new blog posts the more leads you’ll get. However, how often you should publish on your blog will depend on many factors, including your target audience, your budget, competition for the keywords you’re targeting, and more.

Quality will always beat quantity, so it’s better to focus on writing two long-form, quality blog posts per month than to publish low quality posts two times a week.

Another issue that we see a lot is inability to measure results from blogging and answering questions like:

• Is our blog content driving visitors further down the marketing funnel?
• How often does the content we publish results in conversion?
• Which content format is most successful in terms of engagement, time spent, etc?

10. Poor website performance (speed)

The speed of your website is becoming more and more important, not just because it impacts user experience but also because it’s one of Google’s ranking factors. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load, your website is considered too slow.

Have you checked the speed of your website recently? This is quite easy to do with a tool such as GTMetrix. You just need to enter your website URL and the tool will show you performance details such as the time it takes for the page to fully load and the average page speed score.

You’ll also get recommendations for improving your website speed. Here are some of the most common issues that affect the speed of a website:

• A large number of unoptimized, high-resolution images can significantly slow down your website. Before you upload images to your website you need to resize and compress them. When it comes to image size, anything above 1MB is too big.
• Not using a CDN service can have a negative impact on site speed. A content distribution network ensures that your website is accessed from the closest hosting center to the visitor.
• Choosing the right web hosting service is key to maintaining a high-performance website. It’s not the same if you’re using shared or dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is the cheapest option but since there are many websites using resources of a single server, this often translates to slower load time. With dedicated hosting you’ll have control of your own dedicated server and resources.
• Website errors that need to be resolve

11. No backups in place

This is the most important thing on your list. If you don’t have backups of your website and your website gets hacked what happens?

I arrived in one day and my site was in Russian.

I was using Flywheel as my hosting provider so I clicked a button and restored my website. I was up and running again in minutes.

The only way to make sure you have a good backup in place is to ask your Agency to load up your website on a different website using the backup!

Check out 7 WordPress backup solutions compared from WPBeginner.

12.  No good email sequences after signup

The majority of visitors to your website will not be ready to buy so you need to capture their details (typically with an email) and convince them to buy with follow up emails. There are 3 types of emails you should be sending:

Content – You want to share relevant content to demonstrate your expertise and convince your subscribers that your product is the best solution for a problem/need they have. When the time is right, they’ll buy from you as opposed to someone else.

Relationship – These are the types of emails that will help make a personal connection between you and your subscribers. Using video is a great way to connect with them personally.  For example, you could create a video which gives them some practical content but the video also lets them know you are friendly, fun to deal with etc. There’s a face behind all this content. 

Promotional – This is where you send a direct promotion. We’d love you to become a customer and here’s how you do it.  A good salesperson will always tell you that you need to ask for the sale. Are you asking for the sale?

13. Social media feeds on your website

Embedding Facebook and Twitter feeds on your website is just bad.

If you are a tourism brand you could make the argument of putting those beautiful pictures from Instagram on your website but it’s still going to slow down your website.

Plus, this type of content can distract your visitors from taking more important actions on your site or visiting your other pages.

14.  Complicated navigation

Website navigation is one of the key elements of user experience design. If visitors can’t quickly and easily find what they’re looking for, they’ll abandon your site and look for solutions elsewhere. So how do you know if your website has issues with navigation?

Here are some of the typical problems with website navigation:

• The navigation menu isn’t placed in a familiar location
• Navigation options are not logical to users
• There are too many items in your menu
• It is difficult to find the information that helps users make a decision
• You’re relying too much on drop down menus
• You’re using hamburger as a secondary navigation menu

Visitors should be able to move around your site with ease, finding what they’re looking for without putting too much thought into it. Review your website navigation to make sure you’re not making any of the above mistakes.

Check out these Website Navigation Best Practices from CrazyEgg.

15. Poor content layout

The typical user scans through your website and stops at what draws their attention. They don’t read all your content. Your job is to try to get them to read what is important and what helps them make a decision.

Here are some content layout tips:

• Use shorter paragraphs with maximum four lines of text
• Use enticing headings to break up the text
• Enrich the content with strong, relevant  imagery and/or video to capture visitor attention
• Avoid clutter – people love whitespace as it helps them focus.

By following the above tips you’ll make content easier to read for visitors and get them to stop and pay attention to the important information and offers on your site.

16. Confusing visual hierarchy

Visual hierarchy entails arranging and organizing website elements so that visitors naturally gravitate toward the most important elements first. It starts with placing key messages above the fold or the part of your website users can see without scrolling.

Certain elements of your website are more important than others (e.g. forms, calls to action, value proposition, etc.), and you want those to get more attention than the less important parts by using ‘tools’ like positioning, size, color, contrast and shape.

The issues we often encounter when reviewing websites in relation to visual hierarchy include:

• Not following typical page scanning patterns. Readers tend to scan pages based on particular patterns, like F shaped or Z shaped patterns. Designers tend to rely on these patterns if they want audiences to notice elements on a web page in a particular order.
• Not leveraging color to drive attention to calls to action. Quite often we see websites that use brand colors for their CTAs, making them blend in. This is a bad practice as you want to pull the visitors eye toward CTAs by using color and contrast.
• Not adjusting the size of website elements to show their importance.
• Poor alignment of elements on the page. The alignment of website photos, texts, buttons, and graphics is extremely important if you want to achieve visual hierarchy that ‘flows’ naturally.

Check out this great post on Visual Hierarchy from Interaction Design Foundation.

17. Not optimized for mobile

Mobile is becoming increasingly important and a lot of sites are already getting more mobile traffic than desktop traffic. So it’s very important that you provide a great mobile experience.

Mobile optimization takes into consideration not only design, but also site structure, page speed, and more to provide the best possible experience to mobile visitors. However, many websites aren’t doing a good job at this.

Here are some typical issues with website mobile optimization and how to avoid them:

• Slow load time on mobile. To help get your mobile website load as fast or even faster than on desktop, make sure to optimize images, use mobile-optimized caching, and periodically check with Google if your website is mobile friendly.
• Design not optimized for mobile user experience. Are buttons on your website optimized for mobile? This includes using click-to-call buttons, making sure buttons are ‘finger friendly’ and placing your primary CTA above the mobile fold. And how about navigation? Can mobile users easily find and use your navigation menu on mobile? And most importantly, are actions (e.g. login. form completion, payment, etc)  easy to complete on mobile?

Here’s a useful checklist for making your website mobile friendly. 

Summary

The points mentioned in this article are some of the most common website mistakes that we see businesses make on their websites. The good news is that all of these issues are relatively easy to fix, but you need to spot them first!

This means you need to take time to periodically review your website for content, design, conversion, and usability issues to ensure you’re getting maximum results.

The post 17 Common Website Mistakes and How to Resolve Them appeared first on RazorSocial.

Optimisation is one of my favorite words and it’s definitely not used enough in the digital marketing industry.

We like the new shiny objects like ‘Clubhouse’ and we’re very quick to jump onto something new.

But what about optimising what you already have?

Optimisation is an ongoing process where you try something, figure out if it works, optimise it further and then either implement it or move on to something else!

In this article we’ll look at some effective social media optimisation tactics you can use.

1. Don’t just use normal reports use ‘Power Reports’ 

We all know how important social media reporting is. Unless you can efficiently measure, track and act on your social media data, your results will stagnate at best. Once you have a clear view of your data, you’ll be able to continually optimise and improve.

Agorapulse recently released an upgrade to their reporting and analytics capability and added a ‘Power reports’ option. There are quite cool and have some great functionality:

• Create custom reports emailed on to anyone on a schedule
• Create aggregate reporting across multiple profiles
• Create custom comparison period so you can compare any dates performance against any other date
• Get presentation format (PPT) reports which will impress your boss of your clients

And the cool feature….

…. you can label the social media updates you share and report based on these labels. This is great functionality because if you’re sharing different categories of content you want to find out what categories work!

2. Make your content engaging & easy to read

Optimising how you write your social media posts will have a big impact on their performance.

Emojis are a great way of attracting attention but it also adds a bit of personality to your posts and personality goes a long way of social media.

Line breaks are simple ideas, right?

But we don’t use them….

… except Andy below. Can you see how he has made this content stand out on Twitter and made it easy to consume?

p..s I like the call to action with the emoji pointing to the links…smart!

And you also see captions.

Because:

Most people don’t switch on sound because they are generally in work and don’t want their boss to know what they are doing!

Some social platforms, like Instagram, make it a bit more difficult to properly structure your posts or captions in this case. You’ve probably noticed that many profiles use things like periods, dashes or bullet point emojis to create line breaks.

If you want to create regular (blank) line breaks in Instagram captions, you’ll need to use some of the available web tools, like IG Linebreak Caption Generator.

3. Use attention-grabbing images & video

We know that visuals capture attention.

But you can grab more attention by…

• Using a carousel of images
• Create a video using images
• Create animate gifs

I know that creating visuals for social media can be scary for non-designers, but luckily there are many tools, tips and tricks you can use to consistently create high quality visual content.

For example, Canva offers pre-sized social media images for various platforms as well as easy drag and drop editing. You can create your social media images from scratch or choose from Canva’s existing gallery of background images, stock photos, and designs.

There’s also an easy way to create high quality social media videos from the images you created with a tool like Wave.video.

This tool provides a library of stock video clips that you can filter by use case, industry, occasion and even aspect ratio to find exactly what you need for your video. You can then upload your own content (photos, video, audio files) and combine it with Wave.video clips to create unique branded videos.

4. Optimise trackability through UTM tracking

Can you put a real, measurable value to the links you’re sharing on social media? For every marketer being able to track the number of clicks, traffic and ultimately conversions that a link is bringing is key to optimize campaign performance. That’s where UTM tracking steps in!

This basically means adding a set of UTM parameters (i.e. tags) at the end of the URLs you’re sharing. Each link thus has its own ‘signature’ that is now trackable in Google Analytics.

In simple terms – you’ll know exactly where your traffic is coming from in social media and what is happening when it arrives.

You can use a tool called Google URL builder to add UTM tags to your links. This tool is easy to use and it’s completely free. Here’s how the form for setting up these link parameters looks like:

There’s an even faster way to tag your links using the URL Builder Chrome Extension. When you install the extension, you can access it from the top right of your browser’s address bar and tag links with a simple click while you’re on a website.

When you want to view this in Google Analytics go to the channels section and select the ‘other’ drop down on the right and then select campaigns.

This is where you’ll see details such as traffic, goals and revenue (if you have ecommerce tracking set up).

5. Use anchor links within content

Imagine you created a long piece of content which had various sections.

Some sections are more interesting to some people than others.

So instead of always just sharing the link to the piece of content you can promote a section of this content on social media and when someone clicks on the link they are brought automatically to that section.

This gets you better results as you’re driving more attention/clicks to that one piece of content.

Here’s an example of an anchor link which is actually an article which explains how to set these up:

And here is the article which shows you how to set these up -> How to add anchor links to WordPress.

6. Optimize the look and feel of your content

Visual consistency on your social media accounts is important because it helps your audience build an association with your brand. For example, take a look at your Instagram grid and answer the following questions:

• Is there a consistent colour palette in the visuals you’re posting?
• How about fonts? Are you sticking to up to three fonts that you’ve chosen for your brand?
• Are you using a specific filter, or set of filters, to create a desired mood?
• Are you using consistent templates for different post types, e.g. quotes, promotions, product offers, etc?

The answers to all these questions should be yes!

Check out Adobe’s Instagram grid:

When you look at their content, you can tell that they’re purposefully using strong visuals to tell their story and build brand memorability, relevance and ultimately, trust.

The importance of visual consistency extends to every element of your social media presence. For example, things like story highlight covers may seem too small to worry about but this is a great opportunity to make a great first impression and convert lurkers to followers.

Here’s a good example from High West Distillery:

7. Optimise your management process

I have used Agorapulse for a few years now because it helped me reduce the number of tools I am using for social media management. Before, I used four different tools to cover everything I now manage with this one tool.

Here are some of the features that made me stick to Agorapulse for my social media management needs:

Feature-packed publishing calendar

Content calendar and publishing are key capabilities of any social media management tool. Agorapulse enables you to set up a very clean and streamlined process across all your social media accounts. You can easily schedule posts, customize for specific channels, schedule recurring posts, and more.

The only social media inbox you’ll need

Agorapulse inbox is one of the more useful features of this tool. It makes managing new social media messages, comments, and mentions so much easier. All new items are shown in a review filter to help you focus on the latest tasks, giving you an option to reply or assign it to someone on your team.

Additionally, when you are viewing an item in your inbox you can see profile details of the person to the right. This is very useful because you can see who you are interacting with.

Useful templates

What’s also cool about managing social media responses with Agorapulse is that it let’s you use  templates for replies and add images or emojis to the replies. There’s also an option to use the ‘name’ variable for the templates so it will automatically copy in the name.

Takeaways

Before you jump into trying out new things and even new social channels, take a look at what you already have and optimise everything from your content to your process. Continuous optimisation will help with your brand recognition and also with achieving meaningful long-term results and growth from social media.

The post 7 Practical Tips to Optimise the Results of Social Media appeared first on RazorSocial.

We run a lot of audits for companies (SEO, website, competitive analysis, etc.) and we have found that issues with analytics are very common.

Here are some of the typical issues that you should check for when performing a web analytics audit for your website.

1. Google Search Console not set up

When Google crawls through your website to index it, it will provide you with a report that can be found in Google Search Console. 

It’s an essential report because it will give you insights into your site’s search traffic and performance and list any issues that Google found when indexing your pages. 

Google Search Console is easy to set up. The first thing you’ll need to do is sign up for GSC using your Google account and then add your website (Google calls this ‘property’). 

You’ll have the option to choose whether you want to track your entire domain or just parts of it under a specific address.

Next, you’ll need to prove that you are the owner of your website and the default option that Google Search Console offers is verification through your domain name provider. 

As you can see from the screenshot below, this is a pretty straight forward process. You’ll select your DNS provider from the dropdown, sign in to your host, and copy the DNS TXT code into the DNS configuration for your site. 

After that, you’ll just press ‘Verify’ and you should be all set up! 

Now that you’ve verified your website, you should link Search Console to your Google Analytics account, enabling these two accounts to share data i.e. you’ll see Search Console data in your Analytics reports.

From your search console dashboard, click on the property name and select “Google Analytics property” from the dropdown, choose the appropriate property and press save. 

2. Ownership of Website Analytics

When you set up Google Analytics, you’ll have the following structure: Account →  Property → View. 

Account – This is the overall account for your analytics.

Property – An account can have one or more properties. For example, if you had one website you’d have one account and one property. If you had 2 websites all belonging to the same company, you’d have 1 Account and 2 properties.

View – This a filtered view of the analytics data for a property. For example, you only want to see the Social Media activity report for your website.

Quite often if you are working with an Agency they will have their Account set up and for every website they manage they will add them as a property.

This means that you don’t own the account and if you decide to leave this Agency they may not give you access to your analytics.

So….

…mark sure you own the account!

If you are in a situation where the Agency owns the account you can get it transferred over to you.  

What you need to do is set up a new Account and give the Agency temporary admin permission to it.  Then you get the Agency to move the property over to the new Account.

Now you can remove their admin permission!!

When you had your analytics setup, who set up your account? 

3. Not setting up Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is an extremely useful tool because it provides a simple way to manage all the marketing and analytics tags that you have to add to your website. 

Doing this without tag manager is a bit of a pain and you can easily lose track of the tags you added. 

Here are some example tags that you may add to your site:

• Facebook tracking pixel 
• Google Analytics tag
• Website tracking software e.g. heatmaps 

If you do this manually, you’ll have to get a piece of tracking code and copy it to every page of your website that you want to track. 

The better approach is setting up Google Tag Manager and just adding the Tag Manager code to your website.

Now that this is set up you can use Google Tag Manager for managing all this going forward.

But that’s only part of the reason. Using Google Tag Manager gives you the capability of doing a lot more advanced stuff with your analytics.

Check out our article for detailed instructions on how to set up and use Google Tag Manager. 

4. Not setting up Goal tracking

When we work with companies on setting up website goals, we always advise them to write down some SMART goals first.

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Realistic 

Timebound

For example, ‘I want to increase inquiries from my corporate booking page from 10 to 15 by the end of 2020.’

When you have SMART goals it’s easier to track them in analytics.

You can then track how many inquiries came from that page.

But that’s not all….

…you can now track where these inquiries came from – international visitor, social media visitor etc.

There are 4 goal types in Google Analytics and here’s an overview of each: 

Our example goal is a Destination goal and you can learn how to set this and other types of goals in our article on GA goal setting. 

There are also more advanced goals that you can set up, like Funnel goals and eCommerce goals. 

Funnels are incredibly important if you want to be able to map out and track every step your customers take on their path to conversion.

With a Destination goal, you can specify the path you expect your website visitors to take and this is called a funnel. When you specify steps in the funnel (each step is a website page with its own URL) you’ll be able to track conversion data at each step and see where in the conversion funnel visitors are dropping off. 

If a big percentage of visitors are dropping off on a specific page, you should analyze this further to see what is driving the high exit rate for that step of the funnel.

You’ll see this data in your Goal Flow and Funnel reports and this is invaluable for optimizing your funnel and ultimately increasing conversion. 

5. Excluding your IP Address

If possible, you’ll need to exclude your IP address so that it’s not tracked when you are visiting your website.

You don’t want to think you are generating lots of visitors when most of them are you! You can create a filter in Google Analytics to filter out traffic coming from your IP address. 

Here’s how to do it: 

Log into your Google Analytics account and select “Admin” from the menu on the left-hand side of your screen. The Admin page is divided into three columns with settings for your Account in the leftmost column where you’ll click on ‘All Filters.’ 

You’ll click on ‘add filter’ next and you’ll see a form you need to fill to create a filter. You’ll enter a name for the filter, leave the Filter Type as Predefined, select Exclude from the filter type drop down, and then go to Select source drop-down menu and select traffic from the IP addresses.

Then you just need to enter your IP address in the text field and click Save and you’re all done! 

Note:  A static IP address stays the same. A dynamic one changes all the time. If you have a dynamic IP address you won’t be able to exclude it. You can check your IP on sites like whatismyip.com, write it down, restart your router and then check it again. If it has changed, you have a dynamic external IP address. 

6. Set up SPAM filters in GA

In our experience working with companies, too many websites do little or no data filtering in Google Analytics. 

If you don’t set up filters, you’ll have all sorts of fake information mixed in with your real user data in GA reports. To avoid having a corrupted view of your traffic, you need to filter out spam. The first step is to locate the spam domains in your referral traffic report and you’ll find it under Acquisition →  All Traffic → Referrals. 

So, how do you know which of the referring domains is spam? Simply look at the bounce rate – if a domain has 100% bounce rate and 0:00:00 average session duration then you’re dealing with a spam domain! Make a list of all spam domains and head over to Admin → All Filters → Add filter (same as for filtering your IP address). 

Next you’ll give your filter a name, select “Custom” filter type, and then enter the spam domains you want to filter out into the Filter Pattern text box. 

If you want to enter several domains, use the following formula: 

domain\./domain\. 

After you enter all spam domains you want to block, scroll down to the “Apply Filter to Views” and click “All Website Data” and click “save.” 

That’s it! You’re now safe from spam domains and no longer have to worry about having an unrealistic view of your referral traffic data. 

7. No backup view

No matter how good you are at managing your Google Analytics account, you need to have a backup view in place for your Master view. 

By creating copies, your original view will remain exactly the same and act as reference point for data you’re collecting for that property, while you can add filters to duplicate views.

To copy a view, go to Admin and in the View column click on “View settings.” From there you’ll click on “Copy view,” then give a name to the duplicate view, and save it by clicking “Copy view.”

8. Not using UTM tags to track campaigns

If you share the same link on several social media platforms, email etc the only way to know which one of those platforms drove most traffic is by adding UTM tags to the URL. Without UTMs you’ll be in the dark and you won’t know how to attribute traffic to the appropriate campaign. 

Fortunately, this is incredibly easy to do with the help of Google’s Campaign URL Builder. This online tool will let you add tags to the URL, making it easy for you to track the success of your campaigns in Google Analytics. 

Here’s the short form that you’ll need to fill out:

After you share your tagged links, it will take Google a few days to gather the data. You’ll be able to track the performance of your campaigns in Google Analytics under Acquisition → Campaigns. 

9. Not using free tools to help verify GA setup

We’ve already established that proper tracking is key to success of any marketing campaign. We talked about the importance of adding and managing tags with Tag Manager, but how do you check your tracking setups? How do you identify tracking errors?

There’s a free Chrome extension from Google called Tag Assistant that you can use to check all your Google Analytics and Google Ads tags. 

When you install the extension, you can go to any web page and click the Tag Assistant icon to see which tags are firing on the site. You’ll also see if tags were properly installed, or if there are any errors that need fixing. 

10. Not using annotations

Let’s say you are running a campaign and you start seeing some serious spikes in traffic. In a year’s time, you won’t remember what caused this spike.

Unless…

…you add annotations to your traffic chart in Google Analytics!

When you look back at your reports, annotations will help you understand why there was a spike (or a sudden drop) in traffic on a certain day. 

There are two ways to add annotations: 

1. From your traffic/audience reports 

2. From Admin screen → View Column → Annotations. 

11. What about linking site search to GA?

Many companies that we did Web analytics audit for didn’t connect their Google Analytics account to their internal site search. And it’s mostly because they didn’t know how useful this is for understanding what people are searching for on their website, and how the search results drove further engagement. 

Here’s how to set this up. Go to the “View” column in your Admin section in GA, click “View Settings,” and then set Site Search Tracking to ON. 

In the Query Parameter field that appears after you turn on site search tracking, enter up to 5 word(s) that designate internal query parameters and separate them with commas like this:  ‘term,search,query,keywords.’

If your website enables users to search by category, you can turn this on so you can see that information in your GA reports. Optionally, you can also enter the category parameters you use on your site so Analytics can identify which search categories your users select the most. 

Conclusion 

A proper Google Analytics setup is essential if you want to have a complete insight into your traffic, user behavior, and user actions on your website. 

By going to some common issues in GA setups, we showed you how to set up your Google Analytics configuration so that you get the best possible data and then use it to optimize your website for more traffic, engagement, and ultimately conversion. 

The post Are you sure your website analytics is set up correctly? appeared first on RazorSocial.