Analytics Archaeology

Web analytics give you the information you need to make informed decisions for your online marketing strategy… if you’re collecting the right information.

What if you haven’t been? Is it possible to reconstruct information?

We ran into this question recently while working with an engineering company.  They were paying out fairly large sums for PPC (pay per click) advertising on Google and bing, and they were getting calls from new customers, so they felt happy. Naturally, if they could reduce the amount they spent and still get those calls, they’d be even happier.

Usually, this is a fairly simple matter. We look at analytics to see what’s going on, develop a strategy, and implement it. In this case, the paid ads weren’t showing up in the web analytics — or not in a way that could be identified.

This case is a good example of how a little lateral thinking can let you make up for missing information. Here’s what we did first:

1. We looked at the analytics for the Adwords account, saw some common patterns, and made recommendations based on what we saw there. You should always keep an eye on your ads’ performance and tweak your set up in response. The client made some changes in his ad text and bids, as well.
2. We updated the content, and the client also had the code updated. These improvements in the site lowered the cost of the ads. I used to work with a PPC specialist who said Adwords is like an auction where the price of the chair depends not only on who else is bidding, but also on how good the chair is going to look in your house. Another way to look at it is to understand that Google wants to earn a certain amount of money from their page, so an ad that gets more clicks and a site that satisfies Google’s customers better will pay them more, and your price per click goes down.
3. We asked the client to connect the Adwords and analytics accounts (here’s how) so we could see the paid traffic and the organic (unpaid) search. At this point, if there had been goals set up, we could have compared the conversion rates of the two types of traffic, and within a couple of weeks we’d have seen some information.

There are two problems, though. First, there are no goals set up: conversion for this client is a phone call. Second, he’s paying out hundreds a day on his ads, so we want to be able to get some data for him as fast as possible.

First, we can take a broad view. We checked the traffic sources for the few days since we finished taking the steps described above (the chart below is on the default dashboard of Google Analytics; we’ve removed the specific data for our example, but you’ll see the actual numbers on yours). We can see that organic search is bringing in the majority of the traffic, which is what we like to see. We can also see that both direct and referral traffic could be increased, suggesting that some linkbuilding and social media would be beneficial.

Now, we can hone in on the data. We can’t check conversion rates, but we can compare paid traffic with the site average on other metrics. Our paid traffic information is new, but the site average is based on long-term data. We see that the paid visitors spend more time than average on the site — just over 38% more. This is a good sign. On the other hand, we can also see that the percentage of new visitors is actually lower for paid traffic than for organic search. Our client is paying repeatedly for the same visitors.

Moving in closer still, we can look at the cities from which clients come. Fortunately, our client has a national market, and his service is specialized enough that he can track his new customers’ cities. We can see, when he gains a new customer from Schenectady, whether this new customer came from paid search or from organic search. We can also tell how many times they visited, and whether they kept clicking through the ad, or if they came back directly.With a little math, we can determine the conversion rates we need. In this case, it looks as though the ads are doing a good job, so we just need to bring the cost per conversion down as low as possible.

If your business wouldn’t give you this information, that just means that you have to look from another angle. Keep digging until you find a way of getting a good guess at the information you’re lacking.

In this case, we can come up with a good list of actionable items from our digging:

• Set up measurable goals on the site, whether with dedicated phone numbers, compelling contact forms on the ad landing pages, or specific landing pages for each ad.
• Rework the ads’ landing pages to encourage customers to come back directly instead of revisiting through the ads.
• Now that the cost of advertising is going down, shift some of that investment toward linkbuilding and improved landing page design to increase organic search traffic, referral traffic and conversion.

In short, when you don’t seem to have the information you need, begin collecting it — but also dig for it in other ways and work toward actionable discoveries.

Bloggers Boot Camp: a Review

Charlie White and John Briggs have written a book for bloggers called Bloggers Boot Camp: Learning How to Build, Write, and Run a Successful Blog. They are good people to do this, having been at Gizmodo, TechCrunch, and a host of other cool places before ending up at Mashable and CrunchGear, respectively.

You can read an excerpt of this book at TechCrunch, and you should, because it’s an enjoyable read. The book isn’t really about blogging for your company at your corporate website, but if you follow the advice in it, you will be more likely to have a successful blog of any sort. If you are, like many of our clients, thinking that you’d like to do your own company blogging but not sure how to go about it, this is a good starting point.

The first couple of chapters are about finding something to write about and setting up your blog, neither of which is likely to be an issue if you’re thinking of blogging for business. Chances are you have a blog at your website because you know it’s good for business, and you aren’t writing anything there. It sits on your company site, mocking you or calling out to you plaintively that posting about the company picnic eight months ago just wasn’t enough to count as inbound marketing.

The set up information is followed by several chapters on writing: how to improve your writing, how to find things to write about, how to add more media, how to work with PR people, how to avoid mixing up “it’s” and “its” — stuff like that. It’s all good advice.

Chapter 7, “Mob Rule, Inciting a Riot, and Freedom of Speech,” is an entertaining look at controversy and commenting, how to build a community and what to do with it once you’ve built it. Frankly, few business blogs can afford to be inciting riots, however well it draws traffic.  Read “Who’s Wearing the Underwear?” for more on this point.

The next section gives information on how to use social media to spread the word about your blog and how to use  analytics to determine whether you’ve done a good job of spreading the word. This section discusses Google Analytics as well as alternatives and has some great basic information. There is a discussion of monetizing your blog with ads, not something you would probably choose to do for your company blog.

The book finishes up with a chapter on ethics, on how to build the next blogging empire, and an appendix with health and wellbeing tips for the professional blogger. Click through the title to read my more general review of the book (and lots of other peoples’ reviews as well).  I’d say that most of the information in the final section is also not for the company blogger.

If you’re blogging for your company, however, you will certainly be more successful if you can write good blog posts, and this book has plenty of useful suggestions on this topic. There are plenty of screen shots and stories from the authors’ extensive experience, and you may finish reading and feel energized about the idea of blogging.

Is Your Site Ready for Mobile?

Whether your site is ready for mobile or not, chances are good that visitors are seeing it on mobile devices.

Google’s new site tester shows you how your site looks on a smartphone. Click the link, fill in the web address of your site, and you’ll get a screenshot, plus the load time and some questions to think about.

Our lab site, shown at left, has blank spots where the videos belong, and a longer load time (8 seconds) than we’d like. When we answered the questions, it got the same score as an elderly site for which we recently updated content, even though that site is obviously broken in its smartphone screenshot. The scoring may therefore not be that useful.

The screenshot is. Some sites we tested show the site in miniature, as FreshPlans does, Some were messed up, with navigation pushed around and pictures outside the frame. Some showed a different, mobile version of the site. They all got about the same score for mobile-friendliness, but some of the screenshots were a surprise.

Say your website doesn’t make you happy when you test it. What should you do? The GetMoMeter will show you a list of UK web designers who’ll fix you up, and of course we’ll be happy to do so as well. Do you need to?

First step: check your analytics.

The shot above shows you where to look in your Google Analytics for information about your mobile visitors. We can see that the broken site we mentioned gets less than 3% of its visitors via mobile devices. FreshPlans gets about 5%, mostly on tablets. One of our client sites gets more than one third of its traffic via mobile devices, with the iPad topping the list but a dozen different phones making up the bulk of the mobile traffic.

These three sites might make different decisions about whether to have a mobile redesign now, or to wait. The site with 33.9% of its traffic from mobile devices has to look good on mobile right now (it does). The site with 2.8% mobile traffic might wait till its next redesign. FreshPlans looks pretty good on tablets, but 5% is a large enough number of visitors that we should look further — if you saw those numbers for your business site, you’d certainly want to do so. Here are some questions you should answer if you need more information before making a decision:

• Is there an upward trend?  At FreshPlans, the mobile traffic is increasing  — 5% in the past month compared with 0.53% a year ago. The percentage is still fairly small, but certainly worth watching.
• Do conversion rates differ? FreshPlans is a public service, but we set up goals at Google Analytics for testing purposes. Our mobile population shows a 41% conversion rate, compared with a 29% conversion rate for the desktop visitors. If our analytics goals were tied with business goals, we’d need to make sure our site was as mobile-friendly as possible.
•  Does visitor behavior differ in other ways? FreshPlans mobile visitors stay on the site longer. This may just be because of the slow load time, since they visit the same number of pages. If your mobile visitors check out fewer pages, have a higher bounce rate, or  follow strange paths in their visitor flow, that’s evidence that the mobile experience is lacking.
• Does your business rely on mobile web use? If you own a restaurant, don’t mess around. People look up restaurants on their phones, and if yours looks bad, you need to fix that posthaste.

Considering these factors will help you decide whether to prioritize mobile site improvements.

A final word, though: these questions are just about whether you need to get your site mobile friendly right now or can put it off until your next site update. Websites need regular updates and redesigns every few years anyway. Next time you have it done, make sure your site is mobile friendly. This is a trend which will reach you soon even if it hasn’t yet.

#1 for Local Search: How Are Your Chances?

I had a call this morning from a local business which doesn’t currently have a website. We’re told that half of small businesses don’t have websites, and this business owner realized that without a site to send people to, he was wasting the money he spent on advertising. A good website not only lets you reach more potential customers (up to 86% of your customers look online first, depending on what you’re selling, and when they don’t find you, they’re likely to go elsewhere), but also improves the ROI of your other advertising by giving you another chance to talk to people who aren’t ready to call yet.

This business owner had a clear goal. He has a service, and he knows that people deciding whom to call for this service will just go to the first good, economical option they find. His goal, therefore, is to show up first when people search for the service he provides.

What are his chances of getting to #1 for local search? And — more importantly for you, dear reader, how can you tell what your chances are for reaching the same goal?

• How’s the competitive landscape? Search for your chosen keyword, preferably signed out and on a computer you haven’t used for such a search before. Search engines personalize results for you, so any computer where you’re signed in to Google or have made similar searches will give you places you’ve been before, places your friends like, etc. Get the cleanest experience you can, and see what comes up first for that search. In the case of the business owner who called me, the first spots weren’t even local companies. They were national service listings. That means that there are no local companies providing this service whose websites are good enough to get top listing. Our caller is in luck. When we build him a great website, search engines will be happy to have someone to list at the top of the page.
• How are your competitors’ sites? If the page had been filled with local listings, our caller might still be able to get top placement. It depends on the quality of the other sites. As it happens, there is someone in town providing the same service as our caller, and they do have a website — down at the bottom of page one below some companies in neighboring states. They have a homemade website, with typos and fuzzy pictures, but it’s not a terrible website. It has a good amount of content and clear calls to action. We can build our caller a better website, but this is not an unimportant competitor. If they get it together someday to have their site updated and do some linkbuilding, they would have the advantage of an older domain, and they could be a threat. If your competitors have very good websites, then yours has to be even better. A great blog, strong social media integration, and careful attention to the technical aspects of the site can give you some advantage, but you also have to be realistic. You might need to shoot for #2.
• What does your company deserve? If your company is brand new and there are competitors in your space who have been in business locally for decades, you should hope they have poor quality websites. If you deserve top rankings because of the stature of your company, then you can compete better. This may sound obvious, but not everyone realizes it — and not all business owners are realistic about the stature of their businesses. All things being equal, the more important company will get the top ranking. If your company isn’t that important (yet), a much better website can do wonders for you — but it might not get you to #1.

For our caller, getting top placement in local search is a realistic goal. What if you check the points above and determine that you’re not likely to get #1 right away?

• Get your website online immediately. You can’t compete if you’re not in the game, and nowadays a business with no website is simply not in the game. It’ll take time to improve your rankings, so start working on that as soon as possible.
• Make sure your website is better than your competitors’ sites — or as good as your resources will allow.
• Work on your off-site SEO. Linkbuilding, social media, and additional content will make your company more competitive.

Your First Visit to Google Analytics

We have several clients who are just getting to know their web analytics right now. Are you in the same position? Or have you, perhaps, given up looking at your analytics because you haven’t been able to get much useful information from them in the past?

Maybe you haven’t checked on your Google Analytics since the new version became the only version, and now you’re not sure where to find anything (figuring that out has been on your to-do list for months, but it never made it to the top of the list…).

Whatever the reason, we have some suggestions here for getting some actionable information on your first visit to Google Analytics.

We introduced you to your GA dashboard last month, but perhaps you don’t really want to delve into everything and take up web analytics so much as you want to find some fast ideas on how to increase your traffic.

In that case, go to Standard Reporting> Traffic Sources> Overview and see how people reach your site. Read Balanced Web Traffic to get a sense of what each possible pie chart might mean, and then jump right ahead to All Traffic and find your Top Ten sources of traffic. It’ll look something like this:

Our lab site has Google, bing, and Yahoo in the top three slots, and that’s very common. If you don’t have any of the major search engines among your top traffic sources, you need to improve your website.

Direct traffic (people who type in the web address or use a bookmark) comes next for us. If you don’t see much direct traffic, you may need to make more of an effort to invite your clients and customers to visit your website. Training your counter staff or sales associates to say, “Have you been to our website?” while they wait for the receipt to print out can increase your traffic significantly.

Our lab site then has referrals from Google sites, such as Google usergroups. This isn’t as common as the other types of traffic mentioned; however, if you see some of this traffic, you might track down where your site is being discussed and join in the discussion. Our site is discussed in educators’ groups, but there are lots of different kinds of groups at Google-owned sites. This type of traffic isn’t search. It’s referral from a link placed at a site, and the sites just happen to belong to Google.

Next we see referrals from social media, smaller search engines, and articles. The thing to do here is to see what kind of referral traffic you’re getting and figure out how to get more of it. For example, Pinterest is our #1 non-Google referring site… and our lab site doesn’t even have a Pinterest account. It’s pretty obvious that Pinterest is good for us and we should set up an account, rather than just benefiting from our visitor’s use of Pinterest button. At least we have a Pinterest button!

If we click on Referral Traffic (and you should, if you’ve responded to all the Top Ten), we see that we have referral traffic from a lot of places, including New Scientist and Talk Like a Pirate, and we should sort through them and look for general trends. For example, plenty of referral traffic from science websites tells us that we should contact more science websites. If, on the other hand, you have little or no Referral traffic, you know that you need to get started with some general linkbuilding.

Stay on Referrals and click on Landing Pages, circled in red in the screenshot below, and you’ll see the pages at your website that are most often linked to by your referring sites. This can tell you the kind of pages that make good linkbait for your target market, so you can make more of them.

We’ve only looked at two or three screens, and already we should have a good to-do list to increase our traffic!

By the way, the Web Analytics Game at the beginning of the post was generously shared by Theodor Mavrodis, who recommends that winners wear their Black Belts over their jackets. you get a point for knowing the purpose of your website, so everyone can play!

15 Review Sites for Your Business

72% of consumers in a recent survey said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends (hint: way more than they trust ads). The vast majority of consumers do research online before making a purchase, even if they buy in person, and many check reviews while they’re actually in a store.

All this means that online reviews can be very good for your business. If your business happens to be a restaurant or retail store, or if you manufacture things sold in those environments, they’re downright necessary for your business.

Paying people to write reviews or writing your own reviews can backfire. Consumers perceive these tactics as dishonest, and getting caught can get you banned from sites and harm your reputation.

So what can you do, apart from being good enough to inspire some positive reviews? Asking customers for reviews is fine. Providing samples to good reviewers is also fine. Giving a little guidance to the people from whom you request reviews is also acceptable.

I’ve been involved in several studies regarding online reviews myself lately (I’m a “top reviewer” at Amazon.com, so I’m on researchers mailing lists), so I’ll be glad to share what I’ve learned recently:

• The most effective reviews, in terms of product choice, are moderate reviews. Both super-negative and super-positive reviews are less likely to influence product choice. Objective-sounding reviews that mention positives and negatives are the most effective. One study also found that “well argued” reviews perform better, which I find very plausible, but I have no tips for getting your customers to write well-argued reviews.
• Longer reviews are more influential than shorter ones. The studies that make these claims are just counting words, but one mentioned that reviews with lots of tangential personal information (“I bought this for my husband because he…”) don’t show the benefits of longer reviews that contain more relevant information.
• People write reviews for two main reasons: altruism and a desire for notoriety. I’m an altruistic reviewer, myself, but people who do research on this subject clearly believe that people get a kick out of being a top reviewer. If you can figure out a way to pat people on the back for their reviews, you may find that you get more reviews. If I owned a restaurant, I think I’d put people who wrote great reviews on the menu or in the hallways along with the Employee of the Month or something. Just be sure not to cross the line by rewarding them with tangible goods.

With no further ado, 15 sites that allow reviews of businesses:

1. Citysearch
2. Yellowbook
3. YP
4. Yahoo Local
5. Merchant Circle
6. Angie’s List
7. Google Places
8. Insider Pages
9. Pinbud
10. Wimgo
11. Manta
12. Yelp
13. Dex Knows
14. Superpages
15. Best of the Web

 

 

Get Your New Site Indexed

New website owners often ask how long it will take to get their websites indexed. “Indexed” means that Google and bing have crawled through the site and seen all the pages.

Some people think that, when they ask Google a question, the Google robot zooms all over the world checking out everything on the internet. In fact, Google indexes pages in its free time (metaphorically speaking) and decides what a site is about and how important it is.

We’ve found by experimentation that Google will usually index our new sites within a day or two of our submitting the web address, or within a couple of weeks if we don’t submit the address. We therefore submit the URL immediately.

It’s not always that simple, though. Google doesn’t index every site: sometimes it takes a quick glance and decides your site isn’t worth indexing. We often see websites which have been around for years without being indexed.

Recently, we’ve had another complication. America’s Depot, an e-commerce site, was built on a seven year old domain. We had the blog up for a couple of months while the site was getting ready to launch, and it was fully indexed. When we launched the site, there wasn’t much point in submitting the URL as a new web address.

Now, almost two weeks after launch, all 21,000+ pages have been indexed. The screenshot above shows the listing for the newly indexed site.

We see the pages that Google has decided are most important (essentially the pages with the largest amount of content), including today’s blog post (indexed within a few minutes of posting), a popular older blog post, and some policy pages. The homepage has the description from the old website.

So the site has been indexed within the expected time frame, but it’s not quite the way we want it.

First, what did we do to get this site indexed, when many are not?

• The site itself is well built and contains a good amount of original content.
• The blog posts since launch have been bristling with links to the new site’s pages. This has the effect of saying, “Hey, Google, look here! New content!”
• We’ve been linkbuilding since launch, with the same effect.

Second, how can we get Google to see the site more the way we want them to?

• Add a good meta description for the homepage. If you have plenty of content right up where the search engines can see it, Google will come up with a meta description for you, usually by pulling something from the page. In this case, we have lots of dynamic content and images before any solid chunks of text, and Google didn’t get it. A meta description is a good idea in any case.
• Add more content to the pages we consider most important. We’ve seen this with lots of sites, so we know that it can be about nothing more than the number of words on a page, but we can also help things along by linking to those important pages.

Not sure whether your site is indexed? Search for “site:www.yourwebsite.com” using your actual web address instead of “yourwebsite.” You’ll see right away whether and what Google has indexed. If your site is brand new, give it a little time. If your site is old and still not indexed, let us help you figure out why (call 479.966.9761). Either way, add new content and build links to draw the attention of the search engines.

Google Cracks Down on Poor Quality Linkbuilding

If you own a website, you’ve probably received unsolicited offers to swap links,  invitations to buy links, or promises of thousands of links for your website at economical rates. You might have tried automatic link submission software or hired cheap linkbuilding services in hopes of getting that large number of links that makes your site look good to the search engines.

We’ve always told you that poor quality linkbuilding could harm your website’s rankings, and Google has frequently spoken out against unnatural linking and paid links. Now the most recent algorithm update is targeting websites that haven’t been paying attention.

Google sent out notices to hundreds of thousands of sites that were violating best practices in their linkbuilding. However, these notices arrived through Webmaster Tools. If you don’t have Webmaster Tools, or don’t check them, you might not receive notice. The sites that got the warning were given a few weeks to clean up their acts, and then were slapped with penalties.

Innocent site owners sometimes accept offers that sound good. They also sometimes use strategies that aren’t wise, because they don’t know those strategies are bad choices. If you dabble in SEO for your website, how can you be sure that you aren’t facing penalties for unnatural links?

• First, don’t worry about natural links — that is,  people linking to you without being asked to. Google knows that you can’t control who links to you, and you can be sure they have enough experience to distinguish someone’s natural links to you from those you’ve paid for or swapped for. If you’ve never done bad linkbuilding, you have nothing to worry about.
• Requesting links from relevant directories and building profiles at sites like Brownbook, Merchant Circle, or Google Places is absolutely okay. Those directories are like phone books: places which list businesses for the convenience of people looking for goods and services. Paying for premium listings at such places is also fine.
• Paying for ads on websites, as long as it’s clear that they are ads, is also fine. Advertising is not frowned upon by Google — they are in fact the world’s largest seller of ads. Paying for links which are not clearly ads is not okay. If you’ve done this, undo it as fast as you can. Read more about paid links.
• Natural links swaps are okay. For example, we link to designers we work with when we mention them, and many of them link to us, too. If your bed and breakfast links to restaurants in your neighborhood and some of them link to you on their “Local Accommodations” page, that’s fine. On the other hand, if you have a page of links to everyone who will link back to you, from overseas massage parlors to link farms, you’re going to be in trouble. The basic rule here is simple: make sure the links are valuable to your readers. That bed and breakfast’s visitors will be glad to know about local restaurants, but their experience wouldn’t be improved by links to a distant puppy mill.
• Note that it is not any better to do that kind of unnatural linking by using complex linking schemes where you link to the puppy mill, who links to the massage parlor, who links to you. Google is specifically cracking down on sites that do this.
• Requesting links from other website owners and showing them how your content will be valuable to their readers is absolutely okay. If they agree and link to you, you’ve simply sped up the natural linking process by drawing their attention to your website.
• Social media links — linking to your blog posts at your Facebook page, for example, or to your website at your LinkedIn profile — are completely okay. You’re supposed to do that.

What if you realize, upon reading this, that you have some shady links out there? You should try to undo the damage. It may not be easy — especially if you hired a shady company to get those shady links. Do your best, remove all questionable reciprocal links, cancel all unwise paid arrangements, and request reconsideration from Google if need be.

If you need some help with your linkbuilding, we’ll be happy to help. We never use automatic submission or any questionable methods. Call Rosie at 318.572.6002 to get on our calendar, or email Rebecca@HadenInteractive.com with any questions and concerns about your link profile.

What Twitter Can Teach You About Copywriting

I used to tweet for a software company which would send me news about, for example, how a space station was using their software. There’d be lots of fascinating details, which I would then squish into 140 characters. It took a while to distill everything down in that way, but it made for rather exciting tweets.

Usually, you have more leeway than that.

However, if you approach your writing with that idea in mind — the idea that you have to squish as much meaning as possible into as few characters as possible — your writing will be a lot better.

It’s startling how many websites include sentences like, “Everyone knows that there are many reasons to worry about home security.”

First, if everyone knows it, don’t say it. If it isn’t the case that everyone knows it, don’t say that everyone knows it.

Second, announcing that there are many reasons for something is pointless. Jump right in with the reasons.

Pretend you only have 140 characters. Pretend you get fined for every unnecessary word. Or just go back over what you’ve written and remove any sentence that can be removed without changing the effect of the page you’re writing. You may be amazed at the improvement.

Long Web Pages

How long your web page is doesn’t really depend on how many words you have on it, as you might think.

Many web pages are designed to put everything important above the fold, since most visitors won’t scroll before they commit to reading the page. The first glance part of the page contains all the essential information, as well as the whole design. There may be a simple footer at the bottom of the page to wrap it up, but people who fail to scroll down won’t miss any important visual elements.

Pages of this type may allow the text to continue below the design area of the page. Some people will read all the way down the page once they’ve decided to stay, and search engines will “see” all the text at the bottom of the page and may get a clearer idea of what the page is about than they could get from the part that shows on the typical monitor. Sometimes the text is all contained above the fold; if the designer is smart, there’s 280-480 words, enough to be clear to people and to search engines.

That’s not the only way. In fact, long-format pages are showing up more in web design magazines and portfolio sites.  This is not because more people are scrolling down the page, though. So how can you get the look of a long-format page and also have the benefits of the all-above-the-fold page?

We’re working right now on a new website for More of the King, a publisher of religious study materials for camps. Designer Tom Hapgood has created a long page design for them. As you can see at right, the design is quite long. There’s a header and an equally eye-catching footer, with a background nature photo that makes the whole page look like a poster pinned up on a rustic cabin wall.

This is just the right look for More of the King. Owner Debbie Morris rejected an earlier iteration, saying, “The kids look too clean.” She’s the director of a camp, and she wanted the authentic camp look, not something too polished. Tom thought about scrapbooks and bulletin boards of snapshots at a summer camp, and came up with the perfect design.

A successful long-format page needs two things.

First, you must have the essentials above the fold. A visitor needs to be able to see who you are, what you offer, and how to get it within just a few seconds of opening the home page.

Second, you should have things to draw the eye down the page. While the all-above-the-fold page may allow text and people may read it, a long-format page intentionally has good stuff waiting for those who scroll. This page uses fancy images instead of mere buttons to draw the visitor’s eye down the page, the typical monitor will show the bright letters and a peek of the images of the books for sale at the website, and the testimonials are divided visually to keep people from registering (and ignoring) a simple column of text.

The beautiful landscape and the cute frog are rewards for scrolling clear down the page, and the page is designed to encourage visitors to do so.

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