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  • Google AMP Pages for Ecommerce – INFOGRAPHIC

    Google AMP Pages for Ecommerce – INFOGRAPHIC

    Fast-loading product pages could make or break your conversion rate.

    As an independent ecommerce retailer, you know how tough it is to compete with the big boys. Amazon can outsell us all, and they can afford fast-loading mobile functionality at scale. Luckily, independent e-retailers can optimize their experiences to compete—and it’s cheaper than you might think. With the increasing growth of mobile shopping, Google’s AMP project offers a unique opportunity for ecommerce stores to load product, category, and home pages instantly for on-the-go mobile customers. [clickToTweet tweet=”#AMP for #ecommerce means lightning-fast product, category, and home pages. @216_digital” quote=”#AMP for #ecommerce means lightning-fast product, category, and home pages. ” theme=”style1″] Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source project that aims to kick the mobile web into high gear. AMP was originally intended for publishers, whose sites often load slowly on mobile due to multiple JavaScript queries for numerous ads. But AMP is great for ecommerce, too. Slow mobile load times can kill an ecommerce store. The first pages in the conversion funnel MUST load lightning-fast. You don’t want to blow the customer’s moment of expectation. AMP is the perfect solution. So what does AMP for ecommerce mean? Let’s break it down. amp-infographic2-04

    What is AMP?

    AMP is an open web standard that cranks up page load on mobile. It uses a limited subset of HTML. It does not allow 3rd party JavaScript, only the AMP JavaScript library, which must be pulled from the AMP CDN (content delivery network). AMP pages are cached and served from a free Google CDN. This combination produces lightning-fast load times on mobile. amp-screenshot2-pencil In mobile search results, AMP pages appear in a carousel at the top of search. They are notated with the lightning bolt symbol and the word AMP. AMP results may also appear below the carousel. “AMP pages are highly distilled versions of the corresponding HTML page,” says 216digital developer Justin Sims. “They’re not as media-rich or as heavy as other pages.” [clickToTweet tweet=”#AcceleratedMobilePages are highly distilled versions of the corresponding HTML page. @216_digital” quote=”#AcceleratedMobilePages are highly distilled versions of the corresponding HTML page. ” theme=”style1″]

    Why is this important?

    As AMP picks up momentum, we fully expect it to become the new standard for mobile development in certain environments. Google reports that it has indexed 150 million AMP pages, and that 4 million new AMP pages are added every week. That’s a fast-growing trend. Since AMP represents a new competitive edge for those sites that use it, it’s critical to adopt this standard early.

    How do I get AMP on my ecommerce store?

    “With any large-scale, widely adopted platform, there will be easy 3rd party solutions implemented,” says 216digital developer Justin Sims. “WordPress and Magento already have premade AMP solutions. At the end of the day, though, there will be a huge difference in quality and effectiveness between manually developed amp pages and those generated through plugins.” In other words, AMP plugins will work for simple situations, but they may not offer the full control which more complex ecommerce stores require. In that case, an experienced developer can help you get the most out of AMP, either with or without a plugin. cta-ampdev-long

    How can I tell if AMP is doing its job?

    AMP supports A/B testing. That means you can gather real data on two or more versions of an AMP page to see what drives conversions and what doesn’t. As Search Engine Land reports, you’ll want to set up Analytics to monitor four dimensions of page performance. Ideally, you would compare these stats for AMP pages against non-AMP versions of the same products on your site. If you can’t do that, you can compare your AMP pages against different products that generally perform the same as your AMPed products. Here are the four dimensions to monitor: – Traffic – Engagement – Conversions – Revenue

    Is Google giving AMP pages a ranking boost?

    Not directly. “To clarify, this is not a ranking change for sites,” says the Google Webmaster Central blog. But think about this. Google DOES consider load speed and engagement/CTR (click through rate) metrics when ranking a page. As more and more users surf the web on mobile, mobile engagement data will make up a bigger slice of the overall engagement data for a page. And as knowledge of AMP spreads, users will likely prefer the results that are marked with the AMP lightning bolt, ⚡. Will Google give AMP pages a ranking boost? No. But users will. [clickToTweet tweet=”Will @google give #AcceleratedMobilePages a ranking boost? No. But users will. @216_digital” quote=”Will @Google give #AcceleratedMobilePages a ranking boost? No. But users will. ” theme=”style1″]

    What does Google Cache mean for onsite traffic?

    AMP pages are served off a free Google CDN, not off your server. For many of us, that may sound like a red flag. But wait. This is actually a win. Think of it like this: you give up increased traffic to your domain at the very top of the conversion funnel. In return, you get super-fast load times, and you’re still displaying your product and branding. The conversion funnel still leads to you. Google doesn’t get the money; you do. Even better, your domain-level bounce rate *could* go down. People are more likely to abandon your site because the product they landed on wasn’t what they wanted. Now, if they abandon your AMP product page, the bounce happens from Google’s AMP cache domain, NOT from your domain. Once you transition customers to your domain, which you should do at the add-to-cart stage, they are actually much closer to buying if you’ve offered them a value proposition that meets their needs. Plus you’ve already wowed them with a lightning-fast product page. To capitalize on the value which the speed of AMP offers, you need to optimize your onsite checkout for fast load time and seamless UX on mobile.

    Two versions of the same page? Isn’t that duplicate content?

    In this case, no. Will Critchlow explains on Distilled.net: “You should always link to the canonical version (which is the desktop version). That should have a rel=”amphtml” link to the AMP version (and the original AMP version and all cached versions should have a rel=”canonical” link back to the original).” In other words, proper AMP markup tells Google, “There are two versions of this page, the AMP version and the desktop version. The desktop version is the canonical (original) version.” Duplicate content issue solved!

    What pitfalls should I know about?

    A misconfigured AMP page shows an AMP error in Google SERPs. It’s important to hire a developer who understands AMP. Make an annotation in Analytics so you know when you published your AMP pages. If your stats take a dive, there might be something wrong.

    Do I need to AMP my entire ecommerce store?

    Luckily, no. AMP will only help your business when it’s applied to pages that might show up in SERPs or in social media feeds. In ecommerce, that means your homepage, some product pages, and major category pages. If you’re practicing content marketing with a blog, you could also apply AMP to your content marketing articles, since you want these to be discovered in SERPs and on social media. You do NOT need to AMP your cart or checkout pages, since these lie farther down the conversion funnel. The main purpose of AMP is to secure the customer’s commitment higher in the funnel, at the stage when many people abandon mobile pages because of slow load times. Note, however, that your checkout process MUST still be fast and painless. Cart abandonment is a real problem at checkout. AMP can’t help you with that. If you don’t optimize your checkout experience on mobile, all that AMPing will be in vain. We recommend trying AMP on a few select product and category pages, as well as your homepage. If you begin to see a higher conversion rate on your AMP pages, you can start rolling it out to more pages. The best part? You can move as fast or slow as you want in building out more AMP pages for your site. We recommend faster, though, especially for products which will have high demand this holiday season.

    AMP is so stripped down. What ecommerce functionality is left?

    Again, AMP is really only appropriate for use on homepages, category pages, and product pages. You can’t build every page of your purchase flow with AMP. But the fact that it doesn’t support the usual bells and whistles doesn’t matter. The goal is not to build the entire conversion funnel in AMP, but rather, to use AMP to serve up product pages—fast. AMP is well-suited to these 3 types of pages because it DOES support product carousels, though they have to be hand-coded in AMP markup. AMP also supports social sharing, with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+ coming preconfigured. You can also manually configure any social network that isn’t preconfigured. A thumbnail carousel with large image display is still under development. See the GitHub thumbnail carousel documentation for more. AMP also allows you to display different content depending on whether a user is logged in or not. This has obvious applications in ecommerce.

    The Bottom Line

    The mobile ecommerce experience doesn’t have to be slow. AMP offers the perfect solution for slow-loading product, category, and homepages. If you’re interested in exploring the possibilities of AMP for ecommerce, get in touch today. Let’s start talking about your next big thing.

    Sources:

    https://econsultancy.com/blog/10936-site-speed-case-studies-tips-and-tools-for-improving-your-conversion-rate/ https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/ https://www.internetretailer.com/2016/08/04/handbook-holidays-mobile http://blog.custora.com/2016/01/2015-e-commerce-holidata-recap/ https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/building-faster-mobile-web-experience-amp http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/Accelerated-Mobile-Pages https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/amp-your-content-preview-of-amped.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/about-amp.html https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/technical_overview.html http://searchengineland.com/mobile-marketing-amplification-content-performance-measurement-253336 https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/optimize-your-amp-pages-with-amp-experiment/amp/

    Greg McNeil

    September 14, 2016
    216digital, Applied Ecommerce, Digital Marketing, Responsive, Web Design
  • Designing To Maximize Conversion Rate: 14 Designers Talk Ecommerce Strategy

    Designing To Maximize Conversion Rate: 14 Designers Talk Ecommerce Strategy

    Ecommerce design is a unique beast in the web design world. Multiple factors–aesthetics, usability, brand message, and value proposition–must come together to create conversions.

    That’s hard.

    How can web designers serve their ecommerce clients better? How can designers work strategically, with conversion rate in mind? We asked 14 expert ecommerce designers to share their best tips through four questions. Here are the questions. Their insightful answers follow.

    1. Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    2. Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    3. Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    4. Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    1. Justin Metros –– Radiator Studios

    justin-metros-headshot-color_1024

    radiatorstudios.com | @radiatorstudios

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    Typefaces communicate feeling and emotion through their glyphs. This emotion is what gives a visual design character and a sense of purpose. The ‘web-safe’ (default fonts installed on windows / OS X) are limited and leave much to be desired when compared to what is available elsewhere.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Typefaces communicate feeling and emotion through their glyphs. #designthinking @radiatorstudios @216_digital” quote=”Typefaces communicate feeling and emotion through their glyphs. #designthinking”]

    If great typography is an art, then typefaces are your palette. The typeface is the design of the lettering. The font is the implementation of that typeface for use (for the web or in print). And learning how to pair typefaces and use fonts correctly is an important skill for every designer to have. Understanding the nature of typefaces and how they play together will make or break a design, regardless of the source of the font. There are plenty of great fundamental resources out there that can help train your eye on what to look for in typeface, its weight, its x-height, etc. I like this article from back in 2009 on Smashing because the fundamentals of typography have been consistent for a long time. Trends have changed, not concepts.

    Google Fonts are a great resource for designers, as many of their typefaces are wonderfully designed, and the fonts are optimized really nicely for the web. Google Fonts abstract away a lot of the complexity of implementing and managing font files for use on the web. As we know, different browsers / devices prefer different formats and Google Fonts makes this invisible to the designer. No more @font-face, just a one-line script and you’re good to go.

    As Google Fonts has grown, so have the number of beautiful combinations. There is no shortage of resources available for great google font pairings. A few of my favorites are http://fontpair.co/, http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/ and https://femmebot.github.io/google-type/

    Once the typefaces are chosen and the fonts are technically implemented, the fun is just getting started. It’s important to have legible design, especially in a responsive context. Use of modular scale for meaningful hierarchy is a good place to start to determine the relationships between headings, subheadings and paragraphs http://www.modularscale.com/. For more complex control, there are concepts like vertical rhythm which are a bit more involved to implement, but do a great job of maintaining consistency in your overall design. http://zellwk.com/blog/why-vertical-rhythms/ And also, for responsive design, using relative units (rems or ems) can help your hierarchy and rhythm flow and resize nicely across various screen sizes and devices.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    Cart abandonment is always an issue when it comes to ecommerce. We’re out there fishing for customers on the web and an abandoned cart is the one that got away.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Cart abandonment is always an issue when it comes to #ecommerce. #designthinking @radiatorstudios @216_digital” quote=”Cart abandonment is always an issue when it comes to #ecommerce. #designthinking”]

    Our first bit of advice is simple: relax. Many users add to cart with no intention to purchase. Sad but true, better to get over that early on and focus on customers that did have intent to purchase. Users who made it to checkout then hesitated. These are the ones we want to try and recover, and there are some good and not-so-good ways to approach this.

    The first step is to identify what you consider to be cart abandonment. We want this to be a meaningful metric. Adding to cart is not a good place to look, necessarily, as mentioned above. A better place to look is someone who added to cart, clicked checkout, and gave you some information—hopefully at least an email address, something we can respond to.

    Many ecommerce platforms have their own way of determining what defines an “abandoned cart,” and for custom implementations, it’s up for you to decide. Now we’re talking about what to do once we A) know a user made it to a point we consider a potential customer and B) our response to that.

    Sending out a friendly reminder can be very useful. Keep it light and simple. “Looks like you left something in your cart, we’re holding these items for you if you’d like to come back.” Try not to be pushy in your abandonment reminder emails. Use the tone and voice of your brand. It also helps to show what was in their cart to give them a reminder of what they almost bought. Take the time to apply your branding and design to these templates so that it is a direct reflection of your site.

    The timing of the cart abandonment email is also important. This is something I urge shop owners to experiment with. But we’ve found that 4-6 hours after abandonment is the sweet spot. And please don’t try and hammer them multiple times at 4hrs, 12hrs, 24hrs all in a row—that can have the reverse affect, and may actually deter people who don’t want to buy today but may have bought in the future. Knowing a site is going to blow up your inbox every time you browse is not a good look.

    Then there is abandonment prevention. Keeping users in the checkout flow through conversion. This is where the UX of the checkout flow really plays an important part.

    There are many great philosophical discussions around the web on what converts best, a one-page checkout, a multi-step checkout, etc. Regardless of your preference (or limitations your ecommerce platform), we have always believed it’s more about how information is presented to make the process seem as simple as possible. If you have a one-page checkout, don’t show every field at once, because it looks like a lot of work. Try using an accordion style so users can focus on one thing at a time—billing info, shipping info, payment info and review. For a multi-step checkout, keep it clean with a clear view of the steps involved so people can understand the process as a whole from the get-go.

    Having multiple payment options also helps. By having your preferred gateway plus another option (like PayPal, Apple Pay, etc.), you give users an opportunity to use a method that may require less work. They may have autofill for their PayPal, for example, which makes it easier for them to checkout.

    There will always be abandoned carts, but using beautiful cart abandonment reminder emails, proper timing of those emails, and having a clean checkout flow will help to reduce your drop-off rate.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    Category pages are as much a utility for the user to browse your catalog as they are an opportunity to tell your brand story.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Category pages are a chance to tell your brand’s story. #designthinking for #ecommerce @radiatorstudios @216_digital” quote=”Category pages are a chance to tell your brand’s story. #designthinking for #ecommerce”]

    Having meaningful filtering that fits your brand is important. If you have thousands of products in dozens of collections, a faceted filter can help users find what they are looking for quickly. Amazon, albeit not the best design in the world, does faceted filtering very well, and that pattern fits because of the sheer size of the site.

    If your site has only a few collections with a couple dozen products each, try a simpler filtering UX like a dropdown for size or color, as well as a sort so users can re-arrange the category page by what’s new, best sellers, etc.

    Product grids don’t have to be boring, either. If applicable to your brand, try inserting some brand of lifestyle content into your category pages. Maybe after 4 rows of products there is a sales proposition or entry point to another similar collection. Done well, this can make a boring product grid turn into a brand experience.

    With the products themselves, above all else, try to have the best photography you can. And don’t try to cram 10 thumbnails into one row. Space them out and let the users see your thumbnails clearly. If a product is on sale, is new or is a best seller, try designing a little badge or icon that indicates this. Keep your typography clear and your pricing visible. If a product comes in multiple colors, try adding swatches to show that it comes in multiple colors. Whether that is appropriate depends of course on the nature of your catalog. Often times, it’s best to show each color way in the product grid so users don’t have to have an extra click to see it in another color.

    Also, keep your page length manageable. Infinite scrolling makes a lot of sense on sites like Instagram and Pinterest, but when you’re scrolling through products, clicking on them, and clicking back, infinite scroll can cause some headaches unless you put your user back to exactly where they were. Try 30-40 products per page with clear, easy to understand pagination. This helps to give users a sense of direction in your site.

    Last but not least, the header of your collection page is a great opportunity to design a banner that explains the collection, provides a lifestyle image, or adds some additional information about that collection.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    Above all else, I would have to go with something higher level than educating on a particular topic and recommend establishing meaningful trust with your client. They came to you to help them solve a problem because they do not have the time or expertise to do so. They chose to work with you because they like your portfolio, your personality, your track record, etc. By building trust, you can work with your client more efficiently to help guide them through many of the moving parts of an ecommerce site. When the client trusts you, they will listen to you and your advice, and gives you the ability to educate them in all areas from UX, UI, design, content strategy, and marketing.

    2. Sarah Yeager –– Lead Web Designer, 216digital

    sarah-portrait-stylized-216

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google fonts to create great typography?

    When designing for a website, everything comes down to brand message and legibility.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”In web design, everything comes down to brand message and legibility. #designthinking from @sarahmyeager @216_digital” quote=”In web design, everything comes down to brand message and legibility. #designthinking from @sarahmyeager”]

    Your first objective is for your audience to be able to read what you have to say. I get so frustrated when I come across a beautiful website design but I have to squint in order to read their content. A nice rounded sans-serif font like Open Sans is a great go-to for body copy.

    As far as brand message goes, what kind of story are you telling with your typographic choices? Find a font that reflects your brand and then find a great contrasting font. Some examples of contrasting fonts are condensed paired with expanded or italic paired with normal. The key is to find a font that carries contrast out elegantly while reflecting your overall message.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    Take down a barrier to entry. Creating an account before they purchase items in their cart creates more time spent on not buying the item. Let them achieve their goal first and then invite them to create an account.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Want to reduce #ecommerce cart abandonment? Take down a barrier to entry. #designthinking @sarahmyeager @216_digital” quote=”Want to reduce #ecommerce cart abandonment? Take down a barrier to entry. #designthinking @sarahmyeager”]

    Limit the amount of steps to achieve a purchase. The simpler the transaction, the faster it takes to purchase the item, the happier customer. This means, pair down the steps it takes to get from visitor to newly paid customer.

    Include trust builders. People are more likely to be hesitant to purchase from an ecommerce store that does not prove their value. Reassure that they are in good hands.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    As far as user experience goes, you want the user to find what they need as quickly as possible. Sometimes I play around with the number of categories that I feature on a page or highlight a larger section to show off featured products. Know your users’ analytics to see how they navigate or click around on the page and adjust accordingly.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be.

    Know that a designer’s role isn’t just to make things look pretty – it’s about telling your brand’s story, to achieve your business goals, and to create something elegantly functional.

    216-Design-CTA

    3. Carrie Cousins –– Designer, Writer, & Editor

    2-Carrie

    @carriecousins | about.me/carriecousins | carriecousins.com

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    Google Fonts is a great tool because it opens up a world of typeface options to you for website design. I start with browsing typefaces, pick the pair that I like for a project, and insert the code. It’s easy and provides a great workflow option.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    The first step is to reduce clicks. Make the site almost too easy to use. Why do I have to log in to view my cart? Poor UX is the reason I abandon the cart more often than not. It happens when something just does not work. If you aren’t sure how to structure your cart, look at some of the most successful ecommerce sites—Amazon, Nike, Gap—and note how flawless the process seems to be.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    Go back to the basics: “Show, Don’t tell.” Use great pictures to sell online. If your imagery is not good, and I mean absolutely professional, I won’t shop on your site. Everything about your site needs to be clean, crisp and polished. There can’t be spacing or grammar mistakes. Handing over my credit card information is about more than what you are selling, it’s about trust in you as a business and in your interface.

    4. Dirkjan Vis –– Founder and Owner, Zietuwel.nl

    1-Dirkjan

    Zietuwel.nl | Ecommercenews.eu

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    The way we see it, Google Fonts are very popular and commonly accepted. Ecommerce sites use them freely. Backup fonts are addressed, but that’s basically it. Fresh fonts are very popular these days!

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    There are a zillion reasons why carts are left abandoned. Many of these reasons are hard to fix. Think of shipping expenses, the use of shopping carts as a wish list, or comparing total expenses in two shopping carts on different stores. With that said, web designers see a lot of shopping carts! Thus they should be experts on the best experience. Many web designers limit themselves to just the styling, but web designing companies should have specialists in usability. Cart abandonment is one of the top priorities when concerning cart usability. The specialists should be in house if the agency wants to serve the bigger ecommerce companies.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    Category pages are often used as high performance SEO landing pages. They are often optimized for search traffic or for distributing search engine ‘juice’ to the right pages. With these priorities in mind, category pages are hard to master as a UX engineer. The conflicts of interest make these pages hard to optimize. Personally we do have some demands. For example, category pages often have many products. Will you use lazy-load, view more buttons, or split them in several pages?

    Another thing to think about is to give category pages extra user info. Often these pages only contain an overview of products, but category pages are ideal to publish some extra general information on about the kind of products. For example, if you show fishing products: show the intro of a blog about fishing, write about what kind of fishing your shop has expertise in and have nice images for eye candy and inspiration instead of just a plain grid of products.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    Inspiration is king. Many ecommerce companies look at statistics. What works in SEO? What brings views and how to get the conversion percentage to a higher level? In the short term these two factors are always top of mind, but in the long term you should be working on inspiration. Without inspiration you cannot be a brand. Without a brand your company won’t become top of mind. Not being “top of mind” means you have to keep on spending money on marketing and on getting sales because customers will never come back by themselves.

    5. DJ Bradley –– UX Designer, Digital Telepathy

    3-DJ

    http://twitter.com/dtelepathy | http://dtelepathy.com

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    There are over 650 Google Fonts available. These are an excellent source for web designers to create free, web-safe font combinations. I pair Google Fonts the same way I would pair any font combination. I tend to choose complementary fonts, like serifs and sans serifs, to create contrast. I also prefer sans serifs for paragraphs, due to their simplified letterforms that display clearer at various screen resolutions. There are great online resources like Typewolf for inspiration and font recommendations as well.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    Looking at user analytics throughout the checkout process can give some insight into areas or pages where users seem to be dropping off. However, analytics won’t tell you the reason “why” users are dropping off in specific areas. This is where user-testing, interviews, and research can really help find those pain points and allow you as the web designer to design solutions to reduce that friction.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    To spruce category pages up, add a category specific header image with the category title as well as some form of “bread crumbs.” You can also add a “Featured” or “New” section at the top of each category page.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    It has become crucial for ecommerce sites to have a great mobile experience. The amount of time spent on mobile devices as well as the number of people who own mobile devices continues to increase every year when compared to desktop. If you are not able to reach your user audience through mobile displays, you will miss out in comparison to competitors who are.

    6. Meg Quigg –– Designer, Groove

    4-Meg

    http://gotgroove.com/

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    When approaching the design phase of a site, we incorporate our client’s existing brand standards and carefully select web-safe fonts that align with any current brand assets and fonts to ensure the web experience aligns with every brand touch point. Google Fonts are our preferred font library, but it’s easy for designers to fall into the rut of using their favorite 5 Google Fonts. To capture the essence of the brand and create a unique digital experience, we select fonts (style, sans-serif vs. serif, weight) based on several facets (e.g. the client’s brand mark/logo, target audience, industry trends, the brand’s personality and voice).

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    Many of our clients come to us with the issue of cart abandonment. When enhancing the user experience (UX) of a current or new site, our approach is to reduce the number of clicks to cart. We ask ourselves, “What does the buyer’s journey to conversion look like?” One way we do this is by implementing a one-page checkout with a reduced header and footer to eliminate any distractions that can cause cart abandonment. We ensure that all pertinent information has a place within the UX. We encourage store owners to show shipping costs and customer testimonials which add trust and assurance.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    We often add marketing banners that feature the storeowner’s various promotions/deals at the top of the page to entice the user to convert. We create and/or utilize high impact custom imagery that enhances the user experience and captures the brand’s essence. By including any other relative content, whether video or animation, we help differentiate from the standard category grid. These micro-conversions offer additional ways for users to experience and interact with the brand.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be? 


    Less is more. What we mean by that is, the buyer’s journey through the UX needs to be clear and concise. Our overall goal with an ecommerce design is to increase traffic, average order value, and conversion rate. Utilizing white space and page layout, we make sure content and imagery is displayed in an easily digestible format that drives users to conversion while maintaining the integrity of the brand.

    7. Ben Johnson –– Founder and Creative Director, Elegant Seagulls Inc.

    5-Ben

    www.elegantseagulls.com | Dribbble | Twitter

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    Fonts are key to communicating a brand’s personality. Your design should work with almost any decent font pairing. The fonts really just elevate the overall design. Font size relationships and details can have just as much impact as the actual selected typography.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    First look at data to see when and where the carts are being abandoned, then try to work backwards and adjust your design to better convert. Simple changes can often make a huge impact.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    Attention to detail on these pages is key. You want a simple seamless experience. The right balance of white space, subtle design elements, interaction and motion can elevate these pages.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    Break the mold! There are a ton of best practices we can use as guideposts, but tell your own story. There needs to be a balance between users’ expectations and making something memorable.

    8. Martijn van der Does –– Managing Director, Wonderland

    6-Martijn

    wonderlandindustry.com

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    When it comes to fonts, we’re a big fan of mixing a classic serif with a more relaxed sans serif—although the most important factor is ensuring the combination aligns with the brand we are designing for. We actually don’t really use Google Fonts. We find it quite limited and there’s not much space for creativity. However, if we were to use it, the process is all about making a selection that aesthetically complements the brand. There are also a lot of external articles about the best fonts Google has to offer.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    It’s all about immersing yourself in each step your user takes and paying close attention to how they approach the cart/checkout process. Checking out should take a minimal amount of action from the user. The process should be as effortless as possible. From a web design point of view, we like ecommerce sites that play with hover interactions. For example, when hovering over your basket with the mouse you are given two clear options: view the bag or checkout. At this stage the user hasn’t even clicked their mouse and the option to checkout is already accessible.

    The checkout process itself should require as few steps as possible, we’d say no more than three. Also, be sure to guide your users through each one and indicate the subsequent steps at each stage. We also suggest indicating the progress of your customer throughout the process. Don’t force them to register with your site, either. If they’re interested enough, they’ll do it themselves.

    Check out our own checkout process at http://thewonderlandstore.com/ for inspiration!

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    We love sites that use innovative interactions and animations to bring the content to life within each category. Spice things up and don’t be afraid to stand out—you want to create a site that people want to visit every day.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    A lot of clients come to us and simply say, “We need a website.” Our standard response is to ask, “how do you know you need a website?” We like to start with our clients’ business goals and what they want to accomplish. It’s far more than just design.

    We want clients to realize how the role that strategy plays in achieving their goals. Design alone is rarely enough. Yes, you can have a fly website built with all the latest trends and techniques, but you need to innovate within your strategy if you really want to stand out. If users are faced with a pretty website but no clue how to approach it, they are likely to turn to competitors instead.

    9. Steve Krueger –– Co-Founder and Creative Director, The Jibe

    7-Steve

    http://thejibe.com/

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    Google Fonts are a great resource for clients on a budget who still want the benefit of not having a site look like it was built in the 90s. While most Google Fonts have pairing recommendations, they’re not always the most complimentary. We’ve used http://fontpair.co/ in the past, which is a beautiful collection of user-contributed Google font pairings for any application.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    You need to think like a user. Make the experience as engaging and simple to use as possible. Check out our helpful tips on how to reduce cart abandonment.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    You want to let your content shine but still be easily digestible and accessible. Don’t overpower the page with sidebars or alternative call-to-actions. Outlining content in a grid or by using a masonry style layout allows you to retain style while still providing links to category specific content.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    Keep it simple and stay in the mindset of the client. It’s easy to want all the latest and greatest visual features, but if they are too overpowering and distracting, it will quickly deter your client to look elsewhere.

    10. Sarah Cottle –– Experience Designer, HomeAway

    8-Sarah

    http://sarahmakes.it/ | http://thesixbees.com/ | https://www.homeaway.com/

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    Google Fonts have been a game changer for designers! With hundreds of font options, we can finally have great typography without sacrificing SEO. Before Google Fonts, designers would have to flatten non web-safe fonts into images, which of course are not “readable” by search engines. Google Fonts allow us to keep text as HTML helping keywords be found by search engines. With all the different font options available on Google Fonts, designers have been able to push the boundaries of typography. My current favorite font combination is Lora and Open Sans Condensed!

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    Getting your customers to hit that Place Order button is an ecommerce web designer’s main goal! Here are a few tips to help get the customer to purchase by reducing cart abandonment:

    1. Eliminate Distractions—Make sure your checkout process is simple, easy, and fast. Don’t have the user fill out unnecessary form fields—if the information isn’t vital for completing the transaction, don’t include it! Remove anything that is not relevant to the user completing their purchase.

    2. Allow Guest Checkout—Users already have online accounts for so many different products (banks, email, schools, etc.)—don’t frustrate them by forcing them to create an account with you just so they can purchase your products. Eliminate all roadblocks getting in the way of allowing your user to checkout.

    3. Design for Mobile—At the very least, your site should be responsive. More and more users are shopping directly from their mobile or tablet device. A responsive site allows your content to be shown easily on different devices. If your site isn’t responsive, you are missing out on a large audience of potential customers. Go a little further and audit your content and the behavior of your site to really cater for the mobile user. For example, BBD Dakota adjusted their ‘Buy Now’ button to stick to the bottom of the mobile device to users can easily add to cart no matter where they are on the product page.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    1. Display Extra Information on Hover—Don’t force your users to click on a product page to get additional information on your products. Why not let them have extra details appear on a hover while they remain on your category page? For example, on Nixon you can view different styles of the same watch while remaining on the category page. Even having simple hover that shows an alternate image of a product will go a long way in the user’s experience, like Cute+Broke Just remember to think through how you want this to behave on mobile devices as there is no hover—maybe using the tap behavior?

    2. Provide a Good Filtering Experience—Help your users explore your products by providing clear and commonsense filtering options while they shop. For example, make sure you have category-specific filters so users can filter within the chosen category (i.e. Having a “style” filter when a user is shopping a bathing suit category.) Another good practice for filtering is providing recommended/common filtering choices on top of the product list on the category page. I really like how 3 Sixteen shows the category filters at the top of the page.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    I think it would be the importance of product photography. Don’t just take photos of your products with your camera phone and expect users to appreciate your products. Hire a professional! If a local photographer isn’t available, there are many online sites that allow you to ship your products to them and they will take great photos. Make sure you get different angles so your user can truly understand your product. Shooting on a white background will also make your designers lives a lot easier when they want to create promotional graphics with your photos.

    11. The Hezy Team

    10-Hezy

    http://hezy.org/

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    We do not use only Google Fonts. Therefore, such problems do not exist. However, before using the font, you need to check out how it works in the environment and how it looks like on the website.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients? 

    We work with BASOVDESIGN BUREAU. They have an extensive experience in ecommerce. An individual approach to design makes it possible to reduce all the anxiety to a minimum. Abandoned carts are a worry not only the owners of sites, but to buyers as well. Using proven technologies helps ecommerce owners, clear and easy for understanding design solutions simplify the life of customers.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up? 

    Ecommerce does not give a variety of options. And it’s not the best place for experiments. There are proven solutions that work. If there is a choice between an unusual artistic decor of the page and familiar and user-friendly page, preference goes to the latter, although there are exceptions. It already depends on the specifics of the site and type of activity.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    Do not spoil it. Usually, the client is given a good ready-made solution. The goal is to use it. There is nothing to “overthink.” The client needs to understand that everything has a purpose. If the item is there, so it should be there and nowhere else, so it has some semantic or decorative role.

    12. Viacheslav Ponomarov and Yvette Mosiichuk –– UI/UX, SteelKiwi

    11-SteelKiwi

    http://steelkiwi.com/ | https://dribbble.com/steelkiwi | https://www.behance.net/steelkiwi

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography? 

    Google Fonts are great and they give us a lot of possible combinations to try. You can just check this resource to see how beautiful web type can be: http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients? 

    Ecommerce store users are unstable. They often need to check a lot of different resources to find the product which they want to buy. Often, they add some products to their cart on the website, forget about this and go away. If you don’t remind them about yourself, they could never return to your website. So, if you have an opportunity, always send them reminder emails (and ask for email during the checkout process, of course).

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up? 

    Make a clear call-to-action on category pages for the user to understand what actions are available to do. Always keep left-hand column navigation. Show feature banner and introduce the tastiest products, sale offers, and new arrivals.

    Also, mobile view is one of the biggest challenges for a category page. Now a lot of users use their smartphones for online shopping, so you need to think about them.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be? 

    If we could educate ecommerce clients to think about their customers, and not about their own preferences, it would be great.

    13. Ekrem Ates –– Product Designer, Hurriyet

    12-Ekrem

    dribbble.com/ekremates | be.net/ekremates | www.hurriyet.com.tr/

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography? 

    In years past, we didn’t have many font choices to use from Google Fonts. But nowadays, I believe there are plenty of good fonts. They come with various different styles. I try to use the most suitable fonts for each new project and I usually use Google Fonts in terms of saving the client from additional spending and making the product faster.

    I generally try to make a stylish combination by using two or at most three different fonts or font styles for visual diversity. I always keep in mind that readability is the key. So I test my font choices on many font sizes.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients? 

    Cart abandonment is a common problem these days and I recommend a few easy solutions to my clients about this issue. Do not distract users with meaningless popups or messy design. Give users clear and correct information. Nobody wants to be confused or cheated. Offer free advantages, such as free shipping or small gifts. In case of abandonment, remind them that they added products to their cart but did not buy them yet. Always optimize your site.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be? 

    I’ve worked in this field for a few years now. As a newbie, I was so upset when a client criticized my work badly or told me some illogical things about the process. Years have taught me one thing: that everyone can be persuaded. You just have to trust your knowledge and make them listen to you. But sometimes their know-it-all personalities are a big obstacle for us.

    14. James-Lee Rudd (Designer) & Marilena Rudd (Web Developer) –– Hoohaa Design

    13-HooHaa

    www.hoohaadesign.co.uk | @HoohaaDesign

    Let’s face it, web-safe fonts don’t give us many options. How do you use Google Fonts to create great typography?

    We use a combination of Google Fonts, Typekit, and also purchased fonts if the project requires it, where they are hosted on the server and used via Font-face. We try not to limit ourselves with typography as we are a design studio first and foremost. We like to have as much freedom and creativity as possible.

    Google Fonts collection has improved over the years with a greater diversity. We try to limit a site’s use to no more than 2 complimentary typefaces.

    Ecommerce store owners are always stressing about cart abandonment. How can web designers reduce cart abandonment for their clients?

    We always strive to streamline and simplify the checkout process for users with as few steps as possible, simple instructions and clarity of delivery costs. We always make the next step in the process have the greatest hierarchy and dominate in tone or color, with as little distraction as possible.

    Category pages can be a bit of a no-man’s land as far as UX. What are your favorite techniques for sprucing them up?

    When products are listed on a page, we have found that section dividers work well. Within the parameters of the dividers, we have the design freedom to create something that is in-tune with the site’s design and tailored to be clear and informative. Imagery can be used to great effect, particularly to show the context of a product in use. Image-based category dividers define product ranges and help bring them alive.

    Let’s be honest—design clients don’t always know as much as we wish they did. If you could educate ecommerce clients on one thing, what would it be?

    Content is key. Content and product ranges need to be defined before the design process. Otherwise, the design is compromised and as designers, we are flying blind, hoping that the site we design will work with the unknown content and imagery supplied at the final stages. Content needs to come before the design process can begin. Product descriptions need to have consistent sections, dimensions, descriptions and specifications. Photography as content is hugely important. It needs to be a true reflection of the product and consistent in style and tone. Professional photography is a must.

    Greg McNeil

    June 14, 2016
    216digital, Design Trendsetters, Digital Marketing, Digital Movers, Web Design
  • Content Marketing for Local Business

    Content Marketing for Local Business

    Editor’s note: We first published this article in the Digital Marketing Pulse on Cleveland.com. It was so popular, we’ve republished it here.

    Content marketing is a bit of a buzzword these days—and for good reason. With the changes which the internet has wrought to marketing, interruption-based advertising has lost its power in many kinds of markets. People living today have grown up in a world of ad saturation. That means that traditional methods of getting consumer attention aren’t as effective as they once were. Particularly with the advent of social media, the brand/consumer interaction is no longer a one-way street. People want to be delighted and entertained.

    Here comes content marketing, ready to save the day.

    What Is Content Marketing?

    As the Content Marketing Institute explains, content marketing is a strategic approach to marketing that uses engaging, educational, and entertaining content to establish a relationship between a brand and a consumer. In a word, it’s relating to your target market without selling to them.

    Sounds crazy, right?

    Wrong.

    black-and-white-people-bar-men-2jpg-2206168a352dc6aa

    Remember ad saturation? People are tuning out traditional advertising. Consider ad-block software and the ability to record TV programs and fast-forward through the commercials. Even on YouTube, a user can mute an ad and skip to another tab until the commercial ends and the video begins. All of this means interruption-based advertising is losing its power. While the degree to which interruption is still effective depends on your market, we do see an overall trend in this direction.

    Let’s look at our YouTube example. What is the user looking for when they mute the sound on your ad? They’re waiting for the relevant, engaging, entertaining content of that video. They’re not looking for a sales pitch. They’re looking for a story, a how-to, something useful, maybe something unforgettable. When was the last time you paid attention to an ad on YouTube? Can you remember the content of a single ad? I can’t. I’d call that forgettable.

    Content Marketing: Memorable, Useful, Wonderful

    Content marketing isn’t advertising. It’s relating. Imagine connecting with your friends and family. You have certain things in common, and that’s what you talk about. These things-held-in-common establish your relationship and maintain it.

    Now, there are times when you’ll sell something to friends and family. Maybe you run an Etsy store, selling handmade jewelry. Friends and family will love this. They’ll probably buy your jewelry. But what if you turned every family gathering into a monologue about the awesome jewelry you sell on Etsy? Everyone will get tired of that. It’s not an appropriate kind of content for the social space you’re in. Worse, it’s disrespectful.

    A similar approach lies behind the idea of content marketing. Rather than bombard every user you encounter with a sales pitch, you should publish content that’s interesting and helpful to your target market. But that’s only the beginning. On top of relevance and utility, you should strive for that extra something special that’s hard to put into words. To put it plainly, your content should delight users.

    What Exactly Is Content?

    Great question. At this point, you might not have a clear definition of content. Content isn’t just blog articles or Facebook posts. These things are formats or containers of content. They’re not the content itself. Content is the emotional message that your customers experience when interacting with your brand, regardless of channel.

    That means you can leverage every aspect of your business as content. But remember, it has to be relevant to your target market. And it has to be engaging!

    Creative Examples Of Content Marketing

    Local businesses have some exciting opportunities for content marketing. National brands can’t offer the same level of direct, in-person attention to customers as local businesses can. That means that creative content marketing options abound for local business owners.

    Consider an offline/online connection. Why not offer customers a coupon for tweeting about their recent purchase? You get a tweet now and a repeat visit later. In this example, your customers actually publish your content marketing for you! (Of course, make sure they @-mention you in their tweet. To help them out, consider painting your Twitter handle on the wall in big, bold letters.)

    Remember, everything is content. Get your business involved in the community. Maybe you sponsor a charitable event like a run or a bike-a-thon. Get your customers involved, and get interviewed in local media about your participation in the event. Attend the event and take lots of pictures. Post them to your social channels as appropriate. If you take pictures of your regular customers at the event, get their permission and tag them in the photos. (Note: on Facebook, you’ll have to be friends with these people from your personal profile to tag them.)

    The Bottom Line

    Interruption advertising is basically dead. Content marketing is the way of the present—and the future. Start practicing content marketing now in your local market. The more creativity you put into this, the more you’ll get out of it. The sky is literally the limit.

    Are you looking to take your content marketing efforts to the next level? Get in touch, and let’s start talking about your next big thing.

    Greg McNeil

    January 20, 2016
    216digital, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing
  • The Whole Content Marketing Package: Using WordPress To The Fullest

    The Whole Content Marketing Package: Using WordPress To The Fullest
    WordPress has only gotten more powerful in the last few years. The range of functionality and design that’s available in WordPress themes has increased dramatically. Gone are the days of WordPress blogs that are obviously “just another WordPress blog.” Today, WordPress can support any kind of website. The sky really is the limit—and for ecommerce stores, an integrated WordPress blog is a more powerful content marketing tool than ever. Of course, it all depends on your chosen theme. The internet abounds with free WordPress themes. While these themes work for many webmasters, they often don’t provide the level of control which owners of serious ecommerce stores require. Even among the paid themes, you can wade through hundreds of options without finding what you’re looking for. At 216digital, we insist on creating WordPress blogs that fit the aesthetics of our clients’ main sites. That could mean a WordPress blog with styling that’s identical to the client’s ecommerce store—or it could mean a blog that has its own look, but is still part of a cohesive brand. For clients who don’t require identical styling, we’ve had great success adapting the Avada WordPress theme (from Envato Market) to each client’s requirements. In this post, we’ll show off a few of our blogs.

    1. D’Andre New York: High-Fashion Content Marketing

    Image of D'andre New York's Homepage D’Andre New York sells gorgeous shearling coats. Their products are stylish, innovative, and incredibly elegant, and they cater to the high-fashion market. We wanted to take D’Andre’s content marketing efforts to the next level. We knew we needed a WordPress blog to match—something that would nail it in D’Andre’s market. When we installed the Avada theme on D’Andre’s blog, we selected a preloaded Fashion-oriented installation. This provided gorgeous typography and overall design. We replaced the stock imagery with our own images, created the appropriate pages, and voila, we had a beautiful blog about shearling coats and fashion. We chose Avada for its incredible versatility. With the Fusion Page Builder, Avada allowed us to build custom pages without getting too deep into code. This freed up our developers’ time to do what they do best—built great ecommerce stores. Here’s an example of a custom page built in the Fusion Builder. We’re pretty proud of it—check out the Ultimate Guide to Shearling Style.

    2. Quick220 Systems: A Blog That Fits The Market

    Quick 220 Mobile Homepage
    Quick220 Systems sells voltage converters that create 220v from two out-of-phase 110v outlets. The Quick220 Voltage Converter can power 220v appliances. It can also charge electric vehicles in half the time required to charge them at 110v. It’s a great product, and we thought Quick220’s content marketing efforts deserved a blog that matched the excellence of their products. Check out the Quick220 blog. You wouldn’t even know it was built on the same theme as the D’Andre blog we shared above—but it is! The Avada theme is incredibly flexible. In the case of Quick220, we configured the typography, color scheme, and layout to convey the Quick220 brand as cleanly as possible. We especially appreciated the animations that are available in the Avada theme. Again, this pre-built functionality allowed our content marketing team to build the blog themselves, leaving our developers to tackle the big work on our clients’ custom ecommerce stores.

    3. Berg Engineering: A Blog To Catch 2 Segments of Readers

    Berg Engineering's Homepage Berg Engineering sells NDT (nondestructive testing) equipment to the engineering sector. NDT technicians find invisible faults in materials, potentially averting disaster before it strikes. In aerospace, oil & gas, construction, and other sectors, NDT plays a critical role in public safety—yet almost no one outside of these industries knows about NDT. As we embarked on Berg’s content marketing campaign, we realized the Berg blog could play a critical role in public thought: it could bring NDT into the public eye. The Berg blog was a tough one. It had to look like something in the engineering space, but ideally, it would also look accessible to the general internet reader. After all, we were trying to make NDT accessible to a wider audience—and educate the public in the process. The Avada theme delivered on all our demands. The clean layout and clear typography were perfect for the engineering space, and the custom page builder allowed us to include beautiful imagery and headlines on the homepage. With these tools, we created an impressive and inviting look for the average reader. The Avada theme also played well with an infographic which we published on the Berg blog—Everyday NDT Infographic: How Nondestructive Testing Creates a Safer World. Publishing and promoting the infographic was a snap, and thanks to the Social Warfare plugin, we could easily display share counts for this groundbreaking infographic.

    4. Wunderlich America: A Niche Blog with Perfect Styling

    Wunderlich America's Mobile Website
    Wunderlich America sells European-built accessories for BMW motorcycles. As well as offering parts from the original equipment manufacturers, Wunderlich develops their own accessories for BMW motorcycles. These accessories are innovative and incredibly well-engineered. Wunderlich is iconic in the BMW community, and we realized immediately that their content marketing campaign would require a blog that was just as iconic. In the motorcycle community, content trumps design. We wanted a clean, simple blog design that wouldn’t distract readers from the goods—namely, awesome photos and writing about BMW motorcycles. Again, the Avada theme delivered. With the theme’s built-in styling options, we were able to choose colors that fit Wunderlich’s overall brand. The available iconography gave us great options for the four content boxes at the top of the blog homepage (see the Wunderlich America blog). The theme also played well with our custom development. On this page, The Top 93 BMW Motorcycles Sites for Amazing Rides, our design team produced a custom mockup, and our developers built it in WordPress. Avada gave us no hassle when we built custom styling.

    The Bottom Line

    Content marketing success depends on many factors. At the highest level, you need to understand your audience and their content expectations. At the writing level, you need to develop a killer voice. At the packaging level, you need a publishing tool that looks great, functions great, and doesn’t require a lot of help from developers. WordPress delivers, and for these four clients, the Avada theme was a great choice. If you’re looking to launch a content marketing campaign or improve your existing efforts, get in touch today. Our team specializes in analyzing new content markets and building successful voices. Drop us a line, and let’s start talking about your next big thing.

    Greg McNeil

    December 14, 2015
    216digital, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Responsive, Web Design
  • Groundbreaking Infographic: Our Work for Berg Engineering

    Groundbreaking Infographic: Our Work for Berg Engineering

    These days, it’s hard to tell if infographics are still hot in marketing, or if they’ve started to cool off. Based on our research and extensive market testing for every client, we’ve formed an opinion: infographics are still hot—but only when the infographic is truly innovative, or when you’re launching it in a space that hasn’t seen many infographics yet.

    If your next content marketing project is an infographic in a content space that’s already saturated in infographics, forget it. Unless your project is truly original (and it probably isn’t), you’ll get lost in the noise. Unfortunately, given the level of competition, even great work in a saturated niche will likely get lost in the noise, too, unless it’s promoted properly.

    So how do you crack this?

    Start with a great hook, and create an infographic that’s GROUNDBREAKING in its niche.

    That’s exactly what we did for our client, Berg Engineering. Berg sells NDT (nondestructive testing) equipment, such as the GE DM5E Basic Ultrasonic Thickness Gauge, in the engineering sector. NDT equipment like this makes gas pipelines, bridges, and airplanes safer for all of us—but almost no one outside of NDT has heard of NDT. We decided to change that. Take a look!

     

    Everday NDT: How Nondestructive Testing Creates A Safer World

     

    At 216digital, we carefully vet every content marketing concept that we come up with. (Believe me, we generate a lot of them—we keep a sort of running notebook on Google Docs.) If a topic or pitch doesn’t meet the following criteria, we drop it. It’s that simple. Here’s the rubric we use to build great content strategies for our clients:

    In a good piece of content, several factors converge:

    Obviousness—when a reader sees it, they should say, “why didn’t I think of that?”
    Surprise—it should be so obvious, it’s a surprise the content hasn’t been done before.
    Novelty—it should take a familiar concept and extend it into new territory.
    Value—it should provide genuine, useful information, or it should provide genuine entertainment.
    Appropriateness—it should align with the link creators’ editorial focus, while expanding that focus as explained above.

    Content Marketing: An Evolving Field Requiring Constant Innovation

    At 216digital, we constantly reevaluate our clients’ standing relative to every other content brand in their niche. That means we take a relative approach to content marketing. For each client, we ask, how does this content strategy fit into the niche as a whole, and how will it give our client a leg up? Without asking these questions, content marketers risk rehashing content that’s already been done. In today’s fast-paced web world, that simply isn’t good enough.

    The Bottom Line

    Content marketing has hit the “full bloom” stage. It isn’t enough any more to do content marketing; rather, it’s time to surpass content marketing with truly innovative content. Are you looking for help with your content marketing? Our team specializes in creating content that drives engagement and brand awareness. Get in touch today, and let’s launch your content marketing machine.

    Greg McNeil

    December 9, 2015
    216digital, Content Heroes, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, SEO
  • Google’s New Search Quality Rating System: What Does It Mean for Ecommerce?

    Google’s New Search Quality Rating System: What Does It Mean for Ecommerce?
    On 11/19/15, Google posted an update to their search quality rating guidelines. In the post, you’ll find a link to a PDF which provides instructions to Google’s search results raters. These are human users who rate the quality of results that Google returns for search queries. Google’s PDF does not provide direct advice on best practices for SEO—that’s simply not its intent. However, by reading Google’s instructions to its human raters, we can understand SEO best practices in a new way. In this post, we’ll comb the Google document for new information that’s relevant to ecommerce store owners. A large portion of the document deals with mobile search results. While much of this information is not new, it’s great to have it all in one place, straight from the source. However, there are a few points to be made.

    User Intent Behind Queries

    Image of Binoculars Google classifies search types based on user intent. This is a great way to approach the keywords you’re trying to rank for. What is the user intent behind the keyword? It should always match what users will find on the page which you’ve optimized for that keyword. It’s a fairly obvious point, but it’s worth making. For example, if you’re a paid stock photo site trying to rank for the keyword “free stock photos” so you can persuade users to buy stock photos when they searched for free photos, the intent of your landing page does not respect the user intent behind the keyword. This practice is fundamentally deceptive. Just don’t do it. As Google’s instructions to raters show, Google continues to refine its ability to match user intent to honest search results. If you’re a brick-and-mortar business, you should pay special attention to “Visit-in-Person” search intent—that is, local searches on mobile in which the user is looking for a nearby brick-and-mortar location. For example, a music store with both a physical retail location and an ecommerce store should prepare its online presence for Visit-in-Person search intent. As well as a fully functional, mobile-responsive online store, this business should have a fully populated Google Business page with accurate location, contact information, and hours. Incomplete or inaccurate information could stop mobile users from finding the brick-and-mortar location they’re looking for. You’ll find this information in section 12.7.4 of the PDF.

    Google Is Getting Better at Understanding User Intent

    Image Link In that same section, you’ll find a discussion of ambiguous queries that could be the name of a restaurant (Visit-in-Person intent) or the name of a spice (purely informational query). In writing web copy for your site, you should be precise, leaving no room for semantic ambiguity, while also writing naturally. Be informative, clear, and natural. This will allow Google’s powerful Semantic Search to match precise contextual results to keywords that display ambiguous intent when examined out of context. Take note here: fundamentally, Google is getting better at divining user intent behind queries. That means that SEO efforts will gradually move away from technical precision (e.g., including exact-match keywords in copy at a recommended density) and towards excellent, well-written copy that matches user intent. Good content marketing is fast becoming the most effective road to good SEO. We expect that trend to continue.

    Special Content Result Boxes

    Special Content Result Boxes Image In Google’s PDF, you’ll also find a discussion of “Special Content Result Blocks” (section 12.8.2). If you haven’t noticed, this feature has started appearing at the top of SERPs when the query has a definite answer for which no entity can claim copyright. As the document makes clear, SCRBs only appear when the user has asked Google a specific question—for example, “how much does a gallon of water weigh?” In our screengrab, the SCRB appeared with a URL to a landing page—but not all SCRBs have landing pages associated with them.

    Content Strategy

    chess-433071_1280 For ecommerce stores, that means checking content strategy very carefully. If some of your content strategy involves trying to rank for questions with definite, non-negotiable answers related to your niche, you should trim those topics from your content strategy. Google is so sophisticated at this point, it’s starting to give us answers directly, without sending us to 3rd party sites for the answers. That means content strategists must narrow the focus to topics on which they can provide fresh, useful information which Google can’t get elsewhere or prepare from aggregate data.

    Give Users Fresh Content When That’s What They Want

    For ecommerce stores associated with a niche that evolves regularly, that means publishing fresh, accurate content on news within your niche. If users google “boston marathon” and your business is associated with the marathon, you should publish timely content about the next marathon. That’s what users are likely searching for.

    The Bottom Line

    Google is always tweaking things. This causes some stress in the SEO community—but it shouldn’t. Google is trying to create a better experience for users. Keeping up with Google’s constant algorithm refinement helps us all to create better experiences for our users. For ecommerce store owners, happy users mean satisfied customers. There’s really nothing to lose.

    Greg McNeil

    November 20, 2015
    216digital, Applied Ecommerce, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Ecommerce Platforms, Google Analytics, Google Plus, PPC, Responsive, SEO
  • Social Media Buy Buttons: The Next Revolution In Mobile Commerce

    Social Media Buy Buttons: The Next Revolution In Mobile Commerce

    When the mobile revolution hit, everyone had to get a mobile-responsive website. That’s still critical, by the way. If you don’t have a responsive site, you’re losing mobile customers. But now mobile ecommerce is changing again. Buy buttons are coming to the major social media platforms—and to Google.

    What does this mean for brands and digital marketers? There isn’t one single answer. Brands that use Pinterest will need a different strategy than brands that primarily use Twitter, for example. In this post, we’ll take a quick overview of each platform’s buy button functionality. And we’ll tell you what it means for brands that thrive on that platform.

    Courtesy of StockMonkeys. Licensed under CC 2.0. Modified by 216digital.
    Courtesy of StockMonkeys. Licensed under CC 2.0. Modified by 216digital.

    Pinterest: Visual Shopping

    Pinterest is unique among social platforms. Its underlying philosophy is brilliant: to capitalize on our voracious appetite for visual beauty—and to enable our love of stashing things for later use. But as users have long complained, Pinterest didn’t offer an easy tie-in to purchase the items you had pinned.

    That has changed.

    As Pinterest announced on their blog, buyable pins are coming to Pinterest. Initially, only big brands—Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom—will have access to buyable pin integration. However, Pinterest plans to roll out the function to many more brands, particularly those using Shopify, Demandware, Bigcommerce, or Magento as their ecommerce platform.

    Initially, the Pinterest buy button will be available only on iOs mobile devices. However, it is coming to Android and desktop soon.

    For small-to-midsize ecommerce retailers whose primary social market is on Pinterest, this means two things. One, waiting (unfortunately) until the buyable pin integration is available more widely; and two, preparing a good marketing strategy now. Once buyable pins are dropped in your lap, you should be ready to go.

    Pinterest Buy Button Strategy

    Think about what the Pinterest buy button will do: it will enable instant purchasing of a product—when the user is still feeling love at first sight. In a sense, the Pinterest buy button will accelerate the Pinterest shopping experience, cutting out the delay that can change intent-to-buy into a lost sale.

    That means putting your best foot forward on buyable pins—your best foot in every area: most attractive products, best photography, products priced best for your market, and highest margins for you. These are the products you should prepare first for buyable pins.

    Courtesy of Kooroshication. Licensed under CC 3.0. Modified by 216digital.
    Courtesy of Kooroshication. Licensed under CC 3.0. Modified by 216digital.

    Twitter: Products Can Now Go Viral

    The Twitter buy button will appear directly in a tweet—that’s right, a regular tweet that can be favorited and retweeted. That means unprecedented viral potential for actual product listings. Of course, this functionality only enables virality at the platform level. Most likely, only truly innovative and astounding products will see significant viral lift from the Twitter buy button.

    Still, the Twitter buy button is attractive for many reasons. For one thing, Twitter isn’t starting with a few major brands. The buy button is now available to all ecommerce store owners in the US who use Bigcommerce, Demandware, or Shopify as their ecommerce platform. By our count, that’s over 173,000 online stores. In this blog post, Twitter advises ecommerce store owners to contact their ecommerce platform representatives to discuss implementing the buy button functionality.

    Twitter Buy Button Strategy

    If you’ve used Twitter’s advertising function, you know that the targeting options are highly granular. As well as choosing from hundreds of interests, you can target users who follow certain Twitter accounts, users who watch certain TV shows, and much, much more.

    Couple all of this with the coming of Twitter buy buttons, and you have a whole new level of ecommerce targeting precision. That means when you go to promote a buy button tweet through a Twitter ad, you should come to the table with complete, detailed, and accurate information for the market demographic that wants your product. If you match product to demographic well, you should see a high conversion rate.

    Instagram Buy Buttons For Visual Shopping

    Instagram previously displayed concern over advertising on its platform: would ads disrupt the seamless visual flow of the Instagram experience? Instagram decided the answer was no—as long as the advertising format was considered within the context of the Instagram experience as a whole. Now Instagram is rolling out its own version of the social buy button.  According to the platform’s official blog, Instagram’s buy button functionality will provide “an advertising experience that feels native to the platform.”

    If you’re concerned about targeting options for the Instagram buy button, you shouldn’t be. According to that same blog post from Instagram, the platform will work with Facebook, enabling advertisers “to reach people on Instagram based on demographics and interests… We want to leverage the best of Facebook’s infrastructure for buying, managing and measuring the success of ads on Instagram.” This sounds like a great partnership, and advertisers who are familiar with Facebook’s high-powered targeting options should find it easy to add Instagram advertising to their repertoire.

    Courtesy of StockMonkeys. Licensed under CC 2.0. Modified by 216digital.
    Courtesy of StockMonkeys. Licensed under CC 2.0. Modified by 216digital.

    Google Buy Buttons: BIG Changes Are Coming To Online Shopping

    As Google announced on the Adwords blog, the search giant will start adding buy buttons to “I-want-to-buy” paid search results on mobile. For ecommerce retailers, that means mobile consumers can purchase from your store without ever visiting it. Google will transmit all the purchase data to participating retailers.

    For consumers, this sounds like a great way to streamline the mobile purchasing experience. But what will it mean for ecommerce retailers? That’s a bit unclear. In the same blog post, Google says, “While Google hosts the product page and provides purchase protection for customers, retailers own the customer communication and can offer customers the option to receive marketing and promotional messages.”

    How will this work? That remains unclear. Allowing customers to opt in to your newsletter is one of the greatest assets to your checkout process as an ecommerce retailer. Will Google collect this data, giving consumers that option? Will Google funnel this data to you in a useable format? It’s too soon to say. As usual, Google’s blog post on the subject is incredibly vague.

    Facebook Buy Buttons: Not Quite Yet!

    If you were ramping up for the launch of the Facebook buy button, you may have to wait a little longer. As the New York Times reports, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, said, “We are working on this, but it’s not the most important thing we’re working on.”

    How will the Facebook buy button affect ecommerce when it does arrive? Clearly, it will work hand-in-hand with Facebook’s sophisticated ad targeting capabilities. That should give merchants the ability to promote a product post directly to the audience that’s most likely to buy the product. For niches whose primary social platform is Facebook, this will be a godsend.

    However, not all products may see success with this form of promotion. For example, products with many options, like clothing and tech, might appear too streamlined in an in-line product listing in Newsfeed. Without all the options readily available, consumers might think, “that looks nice, but is it exactly right for me?” Doubtless, Facebook will address this problem; but for now, it remains a valid question.

    The Bottom Line

    What’s your ecommerce market? At 216digital, we’ve specialized in ecommerce consulting for over 15 years. We know the digital marketing landscape backwards and forwards, and we make informed recommendations to our clients every day. If you have questions about social media buy buttons in your market niche, get in touch. We’re happy to advise you.

    Greg McNeil

    October 28, 2015
    216digital, Applied Ecommerce, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Ecommerce Platforms, Social Media Marketing
  • Choosing The Right Ecommerce Platform – Pt. 5 of 5 – Miva

    Choosing The Right Ecommerce Platform – Pt. 5 of 5 – Miva

    Welcome to Part 5 in our in-depth analysis of major ecommerce platforms. In the previous four posts, we discussed WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. We examined the inherent pros and cons of each platform. In Part 5, we’ll talk about the ecommerce dark horse: Miva Merchant—or simply Miva, as it’s now called. Let’s get started.

    How Does Miva Stack Up?

    First, let’s talk about what Miva isn’t. Because Miva is so functional and expandable, it’s not for the entrepreneur on a shoestring budget. The old saying, “you get what you pay for,” holds true in ecommerce platforms as in everything else. While Miva isn’t free by any means, it provides great value and—if managed intelligently—great ROI. With a small but devoted development community and none of the inherent limitations we examined in Shopify and Bigcommerce, Miva customization is limited only by store owners’ imaginations.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Because @miva is a subscription service, PCI compliance comes built in. @216_Digital #ecommerce #saas” quote=”Because Miva is a subscription service, PCI compliance comes built in.”]

    Also, note that like Magento, Miva isn’t for DIYers who don’t know code and can’t hire a developer. An entrepreneur considering WooCommerce likely isn’t in the market for Miva. Miva runs on a proprietary script, and major modifications are best left to professional web developers. However, just about every modification you can imagine is possible; and because Miva is a subscription service (unlike Magento), key functionality like PCI compliance comes built in, giving you one less thing to check off your list after signing up.

    For code-savvy entrepreneurs (or those with plenty of development budget), Miva and Magento might look like neck-and-neck contenders at first. However, as G2Crowd reports, Magento doesn’t stack up too well against Miva. While Magento offers a free platform with added robust functionality at a development price, Miva offers a subscription platform plus added functionality at a lower total cost. Since Miva comes with more functionality out of the box, Miva development is simply not as expensive as Magento development. And while you’ll have to outsource Magento support to your 3rd party developer, Miva support is included in every subscription—even at the boutique pricing tier. That means you don’t have to pay $20,000/year to get someone on the phone. As Miva puts it on their website, they offer an enterprise-quality ecommerce solution without the enterprise-level price tag.

    Miva: The Ecommerce World’s Best-Kept Secret

    Don't tell, but Miva is awesome! - Photo courtesy of Steven Depolo. Licensed under CC 2.0, modified by 216digital.
    Don’t tell, but Miva is awesome! – Photo courtesy of Steven Depolo. Licensed under CC 2.0.

    Now, Miva isn’t as well-known as some of the big ecommerce players. But why should it be? Where Miva’s competitors win new customers with a glitzy marketing machine, Miva is arguably the ecommerce world’s best-kept secret. Remember, marketing is expensive, and businesses pass expenses to their customers. If you sign up with a marketing-heavy service, you’re paying for the marketing that convinced you as well as future marketing to net new customers. Ecommerce owners who choose Miva do so for quality and reliability, not for the feel-good experience of working with a great salesman.

    Miva has always maintained a transparent relationship with its users. Miva executives can be found posting in Miva forums and responding to reviews on 3rd party blogs. While Miva script is proprietary and customizations require involvement from the development community, the culture of Miva has an open-source feel. Among Miva users and developers alike, the saying is, “if the solution doesn’t exist yet, it can be created.”

    Let’s put it this way: if you google “best ecommerce platforms,” you may not see many mentions of Miva. But that’s a testament to the other companies’ focus—marketing. Miva has a dedicated community of longtime clients and experienced developers. If you search for Miva reviews, you’ll find many testimonials from store owners who’ve been using Miva for a decade or more. Most say they would never switch.

    Miva isn’t super aggressive in pursuing the low-budget startup—and for good reason. The shoestring budget can’t afford the quality that Miva provides, and the uneducated entrepreneur will take the sales pitches of the big companies anyway. Miva’s strategy focuses more on providing the very best ecommerce platform possible to those who can pay for it. Where Shopify’s average customer does $10k/year in sales, Miva’s average customer does $500k/year. These average customers are both small businesses, but as Miva president Rick Wilson explains in this post, “it’s a different kind of small.”

    Further, the average lifespan of a Miva store is 8 years. For Miva’s competition, that average store lifespan is 2.5 years. We think that says it all.

    The Bottom Line

    As in all things ecommerce, there’s no right answer to the platform question. That answer depends on your market’s growth potential, the functionality you need, your budget, your projected yearly sales, and more. For larger small businesses that need limitless functionality without the handicap of transaction fees and limited access to development tools, Miva and Magento remain excellent choices.

    As a Miva developer, 216digital offers responsive design as well as custom Miva modules, tools, and systems. We also develop for Magento. If you’re considering Miva or Magento for your online store, get in touch today. Let’s start talking about your next big thing.

    Greg McNeil

    August 24, 2015
    216digital, Applied Ecommerce, Digital Marketing, Ecommerce Platforms, Magento, Miva, Responsive
  • Choosing The Right Ecommerce Platform – Pt. 4 of 5 – Bigcommerce

    Choosing The Right Ecommerce Platform – Pt. 4 of 5 – Bigcommerce

    In the early days, like everything else, design was a male-dominated profession. Today, women designers are changing the face of design with incredible innovation. At 216digital, we’re design connoisseurs. We thrive on innovative design thinking. We keep a pulse on the design industry, and we take note when someone creates something amazing. In this blog post, we wanted to talk about our favorite women designers and their work.

    You’ll see an incredible amount of innovation in these designers’ portfolios. In the disciplines of graphic design, illustration, typography, and more, these 26 designers are pushing the boundaries of convention and creating new visual expressions.

    We’ve organized our favorite designers into several specialty areas. But let’s be clear—these designers aren’t ranked in any kind of order. They’re all great, and no two are alike.

    Let’s get started!

    I. Graphic Design

    II. Branding Design

    III. Web Design

    IV. Illustration and Photography

    V. Typography, Calligraphy, and Typeface Design

    VI. Art and Art Direction

    I. Graphic Design

    1. Jiani Lu

    jiani-lu-portrait

    Jiani Lu practices groundbreaking graphic design in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work integrates all aspects of visual communication—imagery, graphic elements, and typography—with a new kind of flair that we haven’t seen before.

    Shown: To My Future Self. Used by permission of Jiani Lu.
    Shown: To My Future Self. Used by permission of Jiani Lu.

    Jiani is a Canadian designer working in multiple disciplines. She has won awards from AIGA, Graphis, Adobe, and others.

    https://twitter.com/Jaicca

    http://jianimakesthings.tumblr.com/

    https://www.instagram.com/jianilu/

    2. Fanny Öhlund

    fanny-ohlund-portrait

    Fanny Öhlund is forging a career in cutting-edge design. Her work features beautiful graphics and typography integrated into a unique whole. She has done work in print design, album cover design, branding, and more.

    fanny-ohlund-ahpi
    Shown: Áhpi album cover. Used by permission of Fanny Öhlund.

    Fanny’s sense of pattern, contrast, and color is truly beautiful. For this writer, her work is often more than the sum of its parts. For more of Fanny’s work, see her website or Behance page.

    www.behance.net/fohlund

    www.instagram.com/fohlund/

    www.pinterest.com/garconette

    3. Teresa Sdralevich

    teresa-sdralevich-portrait

    Teresa Sdralevich has forged a remarkable career in illustration, poster design, and cover design. Her work utilizes large blocks of color and bold typography. She often engages social, political, and cultural issues, and her approach draws the most out of a simple collection of elements.

    Book cover: Vota Larry, by Janet Tashjian. Used by permission of Teresa Sdralevich.
    Book cover: Vota Larry, by Janet Tashjian. Used by permission of Teresa Sdralevich.

    Teresa was born in Milan in 1969. She currently lives and works in Brussels, where she practices silkscreen printing in a collaborative space shared with other artists.

    https://www.facebook.com/Teresa-Sdralevich-433513896776490/

    4. Fanette Mellier

    Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2015 – Pt. 4 – Bigcommerce

    Welcome to Part 4 of our series on ecommerce platforms. In the previous installments, we examined WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento. We discussed the inherent pros and cons of each platform. We concluded that WooCommerce is an excellent basic option. We also mentioned that Shopify’s transaction fee schedule could hurt high-growth businesses. In looking at Magento, we concluded that almost every business model would need custom development to fully utilize Magento’s functionality. In Part 4, we’ll look at another big ecommerce name: Bigcommerce. Let’s jump right in!

    Bigcommerce:

    Bigcommerce is growing fast. The Revolution Fund invested $40 million in Bigcommerce in 2013. SoftBank Capital and others pitched in $50 million in 2014, bringing the company’s net worth to $500 million. With something like 90,000 online stores running on the platform, Bigcommerce has big market share. Its features are quite competitive, though customer complaints suggest a lack of adequate support.

    Industry insiders agree that Bigcommerce has one thing down pat: they’re a marketing powerhouse. An aggressive campaign has netted them tens of thousands of new users. When Magento pulled the plug on Magento Go, their SaaS (software as a service) version, they sent approximately 10,000 customers to Bigcommerce. However, big things develop their own kinds of problems. When a company’s goal is to eat up an entire market, other considerations can fall by the wayside. Though ecommerce beginners may not realize it, Bigcommerce has some serious shortcomings that limit its adaptability.

    While Bigcommerce boasts tons of bells and whistles, it doesn’t give users some crucial features. As this thread in the Miva Merchant community forums explains, Bigcommerce doesn’t allow for template logic. In other words, you can’t add code to create a conditional statement like, “for this family of products, include a download link to the manufacturer’s docmuntation.” This is a serious shortcoming—and one with no workaround. Further, because of Bigcommerce’s API, you can’t integrate 3rd party functionality into the platform. This stands in stark contrast to Miva and Magento, which offer vibrant development communities and total freedom to develop custom 3rd party integrations.

    Photo courtesy of Mark Sebastian. Licensed under CC 2.0. Modified by 216digital.
    Photo courtesy of Mark Sebastian. Licensed under CC 2.0. Modified by 216digital.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Unlike #miva and #magento, #bigcommerce can’t do template logic. @216_Digital” quote=”Unlike Miva and Magento, Bigcommerce can’t do template logic.”]

    That’s not the only thing we worry about when we look at Bigcommerce. In the development area, user FTP access is limited to a few folders. Worse, Bigcommerce doesn’t provide any database access. That means if you want to change anything in those areas, you’re out of luck. Some developers complain that Bigcommerce’s code is too hefty, potentially dragging down SEO results. Finally, as with Shopify, you can only host a Bigcommerce store on Bigcommerce servers.

    The Bottom Line

    For a certain segment of the ecommerce market, Bigcommerce will work just fine. Ecommerce store owners who don’t need certain functionality and have no development background will love Bigcommerce. It works, it looks great, it provides a lot of power out of the box, it’s easy to use, and hosting is included. The trouble is getting functionality that’s not provided in the software itself. For store owners who want limitless custom functionality, Miva and Magento are lightyears ahead of Bigcommerce.

    Stay tuned. In Part 5 of 5 in our series, we take an in-depth look at Miva. Mellier has built a remarkable career in graphic design, typography, and print design. Her work uses simple geometric shapes arranged in strategic placement. Her strong eye for color transforms her minimal geometry into vibrant, cohesive works.

    Fanette completed her education at the Graduate School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. She learned from masters such as Pierre Di Sciullo and Pierre Bernard. With this background, she has contributed significantly to the world of typography and intellectual communication.

    https://www.facebook.com/fanettemelliergraphiste/

    5. Anna Kuts

    anna-kuts-portrait

    Anna Kuts is a graphic designer, photographer, and calligrapher from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her work marries a strong emphasis on texture with a nuanced approach to color. She is passionate about logo design in particular. She often combines unique textures with clear vector elements, and the results are beautiful.

    Print
    Kharkov Guitar Quartet Poster. Used by permission of Anna Kuts.

    We see a little Soviet Constructivist influence in this poster, but the overall effect is unmistakably contemporary. The piece contains excellent contrast, and the overall look is quite balanced.

    https://www.pinterest.com/anya_kuts/

    https://dribbble.com/Kuts

    https://www.instagram.com/kustec007/

    6. Mercedes Bazan

    mercedes-bazan-portrait

    Mercedes Bazan specializes in UI, UX, and editorial design. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work features strong graphic elements, complex alignments, and refreshing color palettes. Her editorial designs in the magazine field are fresh, contemporary, and surprising.

    Shown: Nikola Tesla Pressbook. Used by permission of Mercedes Bazan.
    Shown: Nikola Tesla Pressbook. Used by permission of Mercedes Bazan.

    For more of Mercedes’ work, see her profile on Behance, or follow her on social media.

    https://www.instagram.com/mechibaz/

    https://twitter.com/mechibaz

    7. Cristina Pagnoncelli

    cristina-pagnoncelli-portrait

    Cristina Pagnoncelli’s work utilizes great typography, balanced composition, and a clear sense of cohesiveness. Cristina shows an ability to weave seemingly unrelated elements into a total composition. Her use of type and lettering is particularly inspiring. Facebook asked her to create 10 letterings inspired by American cities. Now Facebook users can use these letterings on their photos.

    Shown: Orlando lettering. Used by permission of Cristina Pagnoncelli.
    Shown: Orlando lettering. Used by permission of Cristina Pagnoncelli.

    With her sister, Raquel Pagnoncelli, she runs Des Figure, a communication studio. Cristina’s work shows an intuitive understanding of diverse graphic disciplines. She is one to watch.

    https://www.pinterest.com/crispagnoncelli/

    https://twitter.com/CrisPagnoncelli

    8. Sue Doeksen

    sue-doeksen-portrait

    Sue Doeksen is a graphic designer based in Amsterdam. She often focuses on bold color, eye-popping texture, and a fun approach to high-concept design. Her work is thoroughly contemporary, yet it knows its roots in great European design.

    Shown: Landmark Pins. Used by permission of Sue Doeksen.
    Shown: Landmark Pins. Used by permission of Sue Doeksen.

    Sue describes herself as a “visual adventurer.” This approach shows in all her work. Sue’s designs are not static works; they seem to transform themselves as you look at them—even those that aren’t animated. Sue has collaborated multiple times with fellow Dutch designer Marta Veludo (see below).

    9. Marta Veludo

    marta-veludo-portrait

    Marta Veludo is an Amsterdam-based graphic designer, artist, and visual thinker. She works in a wide variety of design fields, including art direction, graphic design, brand communication, and set design. Her work regularly features playful colors and visual relationships.

    Shown: D & R Wedding Invitation. Used by permission of Marta Veludo.
    Shown: D & R Wedding Invitation. Used by permission of Marta Veludo.

    Marta’s work is truly unmistakable. She marries a quirky eye to a strong sense of formalism. The result is a dynamic visual language that is contemporary, yet knows its history. She has collaborated multiple times with fellow Dutch designer Sue Doeksen (see above).

    https://twitter.com/whiteponey

    https://www.facebook.com/martaveludostudio/

    https://www.instagram.com/martaveludo/

    10. Nora Demeczky

     

    nora-demeczky-portrait

    Along with Enikő Deri (see below), Nora Demeczky runs De-Form, a design agency based in Budapest. Her work features a strong graphic impact and carefully-constructed balance across a cohesive whole. She achieves a great balance between form and content.

    Shown: mome+ 1.0. Used by permission of De Form.
    Shown: mome+ 1.0. Used by permission of De Form.

    http://nora-demeczky.tumblr.com/

    11. Enikő Deri

    eniko-deri-portrait

    Enikő Deri runs De Form, a Hungarian design agency, along with Nora Demeczky (see above). Her work often features dramatic use of geometry in strict black-and-white. Her shapes and organization are incredibly fresh, and the overall effect she creates is mesmerizing.

    Shown: Albert. Used by permission of De Form.
    Shown: Albert. Used by permission of De Form.

    II. Branding Design

    12. Kelsy Stromski

    Photograph by Kyle Caldwell.
    Photograph by Kyle Caldwell.

    Kelsy Stromski founded Refinery 43 to design cohesive visual identities for her clients. She has designed unique branding for interior design studios, personal brands, nonprofits, food products, and more. Her design expertise is highly fluid and adaptable.

    Shown: Bouchard Family Farms Ployes pancake mix packaging. Used by permission of Kelsy Stromski.
    Shown: Bouchard Family Farms Ployes pancake mix packaging. Used by permission of Kelsy Stromski.

    Kelsy’s work is firmly grounded in a thorough knowledge of her clients. She combines this knowledge with a deep understanding of the intended audience for the brand. The result is highly-targeted branding.

    https://www.facebook.com/Refinery43

    https://www.instagram.com/refinery43/

    https://www.pinterest.com/Refinery43/

    13. Ipek Eris

    ipek-eris-portrait

    Ipek Eris is a freelance designer working in the fields of branding, logo design, and corporate identity. She has lived in Kenya, France, Germany, and England. This experience has given her an eclectic visual sense, and it shows in her work.

    Shown: Rumeli70 Pharmacy branding package. Used by permission of Ipek Eris.
    Shown: Rumeli70 Pharmacy branding package. Used by permission of Ipek Eris.

    Ipek’s work shows a keen awareness of her client’s needs, married to a great visual sense. She establishes unity between separate elements by repeating motifs with variation.

    https://www.facebook.com/ipekerisdesign/

    https://www.instagram.com/ipekerisdesign/

    III. Web Design

    14. Sarah Yeager

     

    sarah-portrait-stylized-216

    We didn’t have to look far to find this designer. Sarah Yeager works for us! And while you may chuckle at the fact that we included our own designer in this list, wait till you see her work. It’s why we hired her.

    Shown: MatVacay app design.
    Shown: MatVacay app design.
    Shown: Textbookly.com website.
    Shown: Textbookly.com website.
    Shown: Sarah’s award-winning design of EmpoweRING, a piece of jewelry that lets the wearer send a distress signal to emergency contacts if he or she is in danger.
    Shown: Sarah’s award-winning design of EmpoweRING, a piece of jewelry that lets the wearer send a distress signal to emergency contacts if he or she is in danger.
    Shown: #BrainCandies branding for WedoWE.
    Shown: #BrainCandies branding for WedoWE.

    Sarah received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from Kent State University. Aside from her design education, Sarah’s wide range of interests also informs her design process. She has worked in entrepreneurship, videography, photography, and painting. She finds these experiences invaluable as she designs websites, logos, and creatives for our clients.

    https://twitter.com/sarahmyeager

    https://www.facebook.com/sarahyeagerdesign

    IV. Illustration and Photography

    15. Lola Dupré

    Shown: John French with Hasselblad, paper collage on panel, 18x12.5 inches. Used by permission of Lola Dupré.
    Shown: John French with Hasselblad, paper collage on panel, 18×12.5 inches. Used by permission of Lola Dupré.

    Lola Dupré has created an incredible illustration style. Working exclusively with paper and scissors, she makes surreal, distorted images, often using the human body as her subject. In enlarging some parts of her source image, she criticizes cultural assumptions about gender and beauty. Her work is beautiful, disturbing, and unmistakable.

    https://www.facebook.com/dupre.lola/

    https://twitter.com/loladupre

    16. Nina Geometrieva

    nina-geometrieva-portrait

    Nina Geometrieva is a rising star in photography, graphic design, and branding. She brings a strong sense of geometry to her design as well as her photojournalism. For this writer, her most incredible work is the stunning photoshoot of Tokyo which she produced with Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov—including the capsule hotel photos which you’ve probably seen somewhere on the internet already.

    Shown: Tōkyō desu. Used by permission of Nina Geometrieva.
    Shown: Tōkyō desu. Used by permission of Nina Geometrieva.

    Nina and Damjan documented their Tokyo trip in this Medium post. Check it out for more incredible animated GIFs.

    https://www.instagram.com/geometrieva/

    https://www.facebook.com/geometrieva

    17. Nadzeya Makeyeva

    nadzeya-portrait

    Nadzeya Makeyeva is an illustrator and designer based in Minsk, Belarus. Her work features ingenious use of texture and line, and each piece seems to create and inhabit its own world. Check out her Psilocybin Rabbit:

    Shown: Psilocybin Rabbit. Used by permission of Nadzeya Makeyeva.
    Shown: Psilocybin Rabbit. Used by permission of Nadzeya Makeyeva.

    Nadzeya attended College of Arts #26 in Minsk. She has worked as a concept artist, illustrator, designer, and UI/UX designer, at multiple firms and as a freelancer. Her work shows a remarkable fluidity and ability to adapt to different purposes, styles, and materials.

    https://www.facebook.com/nadzeya.makeyeva.illustrations

    https://www.instagram.com/tonnel/

    18. Vicki Turner

    Vick-Turner-portrait

    Vicki Turner is a British designer and illustrator with a strong eye for color, shape, and line. Her work features incredible geometric representations of common shapes. Vicki has developed her own consistent style, almost an iconographic language which is easily understood by anyone.

    Shown: Misty Morning Commute, shortlisted for the AOI & TFL Prize for Illustration. Used by permission of Vicki Turner.
    Shown: Misty Morning Commute, shortlisted for the AOI & TFL Prize for Illustration. Used by permission of Vicki Turner.

    Vicki has worked with non-profits, startups, and everything in between. She brings a problem-solving mindset to the client relationship, and she offers insight on product and branding. She is also the founder of Feist Forest, a boutique builder of fine wooden tables for creatives.

    https://twitter.com/vickimturner

    https://www.pinterest.com/vickimturner/

    https://www.instagram.com/vickimturner/

    19. Erin Zingré

    erin-zingre-ern1_800px

    Erin Zingré started her illustration career in style, at age 4, with a preschool drawing of the Headless Horseman, a Guillotine, and Death Himself. As she puts it, this drawing still captures the essence of her work: “kinda cute, kinda creepy, and altogether not-quite-right.” It’s a beautiful kind of not-quite-right.

    Shown: Coloring Book for Grownups. Used by permission of Erin Zingré.
    Shown: Coloring Book for Grownups. Used by permission of Erin Zingré.

    Erin is a multidisciplinary designer now working out of Seattle. She is not taking freelance work at this time, due to her work designing at Amazon. With this talent, it’s no surprise she’s been snatched up.

    https://www.instagram.com/ernzinger/

    https://www.behance.net/erinzingre

    http://erinzingre.tumblr.com/

    20. Anna Grosh

    anna-grosh-portrait

    Anna Grosh is a Siberian designer working in San Francisco, CA. She specializes in illustration, typography and lettering, and design. Her illustration shows a nuanced touch and a powerful expression of emotion.

    Shown Circus D'Hiver Bouglion poster. Used by permission of Anna Grosh.
    Shown Circus D’Hiver Bouglion poster. Used by permission of Anna Grosh.

    Anna also excels at highly ornamented work and calligraphy. In the digital age, it’s refreshing to see a human touch and detailed hand work. Anna is one to watch.

    V. Typography, Calligraphy, and Typeface Design

    21. Marian Bantjes

    marian-bantjes-twitter

    Marian Bantjes has forged a remarkable career. Her work spans graphic design, typography, calligraphy, and lettering, and it has won her international acclaim. In the following piece, which she created for AGI’s annual special project, she used dirt and sand from around the world to create a Coexistence poster. Note the obsessive attention to detail—and the transience: she didn’t glue the sand down, and she wiped the poster away after photographing it.

    Shown: AGI: Coexistence. Used by permission of Marian Bantjes.
    Shown: AGI: Coexistence. Used by permission of Marian Bantjes.

    Marian worked as a book typesetter from 1984-1994. From 1994-2003, she ran Digitopolis, a graphic design studio which she cofounded. From 2003 to the present, she has pursued freelance work in design, art, and lettering.

    https://twitter.com/bantjes

    https://www.instagram.com/bantjes/

    22. Laura Pol

    laura-pol-portrait2

    Laura Pol is a designer, photographer, and videographer based in Venice, CA. As a designer, she has created a wide variety of logos, both type-based and graphic, in which she integrates clean typography with an overall aesthetic. She has also created several fonts, which are available for free (donation suggested) on her website.

    Shown: Tyde Font sample. Used by permission of Laura Pol.
    Shown: Tyde Font sample. Used by permission of Laura Pol.

    Typography and typeface design aren’t Laura’s only pursuits. She has also collaborated on editorial designs, art direction, branding, and more.

    https://twitter.com/laura_pol

    https://www.instagram.com/laurapol/

    https://www.pinterest.com/laurapol415/

    23. Lisa Pan

    lisa-pan-1

    Lisa Pan (Pan, Yi) is a graphic designer based in Taipei, Taiwan. She has developed an incredible illustration style, and she also excels at creating beautiful typography. She often combines lettering with illustrative work. Her pieces are truly jaw-dropping.

    Shown: Typoholic Zoology Collection. Used by permission of Lisa Pan.
    Shown: Typoholic Zoology Collection. Used by permission of Lisa Pan.

    Lisa shows an incredible ability to adapt her illustration style and her typographic sense to any project. Her work also shows a great balance between complex and simple textures.

    https://www.behance.net/Lisa_Pan

     

    VI. Art and Art Direction

    24. Louise Mertens

    louisemertens-portrait

    Louise Mertens received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in graphic design at Sint-Lucas Antwerpen. While in school, she interned at Mirror Mirror. After an internship at Sagmeister and Walsh, she launched Louise Mertens Studio in 2014. She now specializes in art and art direction, with a strong emphasis on collage. In the work below, she achieves a dynamic unity from several competing elements.

    Above: Jiyu 4. Used by permission of Louise Mertens.
    Shown: Jiyu 4. Used by permission of Louise Mertens.

    Louise’s use of color and her carefully-combined textures are unmistakable. As she says on her website, she is “inspired by the female body, the mysterious, and the incomprehensible.” She has developed a truly unique style.

    https://www.facebook.com/mertenslouise

    https://twitter.com/mertenslouise

    https://www.instagram.com/louise_mertens/

    25. Marta Gawin

    marta-gawin-portrait

    Marta Gawin practices design in Katowice, Poland. She specializes in editorial, poster, exhibition, and visual identity design. Her work features strong contrast between graphic elements, plus incredible typography.

    Shown: JazzArt Festival 2015. Used by permission of Marta Gawin.
    Shown: JazzArt Festival 2015. Used by permission of Marta Gawin.

    Marta earned her MA in Graphic Design from the Academy of Fine Arts, Katowice, in 2011. She works as a freelancer now, and she is regularly hired by both commercial organizations and cultural institutions. Her work is high-concept, with a heavy emphasis on unique content.

    https://www.behance.net/martagawin

    https://vimeo.com/48397655

    26. Candy Chang

    candy-chang-sidewalk

    Candy Chang takes her background in urban planning, her expressive sense, and her training in design and combines them to create beautiful public art installations. Among many incredible works, she created the Before I Die phenomenon—a black wall stenciled with the phrase, “Before I die _____”.

    Shown: Before I Die. Used by permission of Candy Chang.
    Shown: Before I Die. Used by permission of Candy Chang.

    This is a participatory public artwork which invites passersby to share their deepest longings in public. The original Before I Die wall in New Orleans gained international attention, and now there are over 1,000 Before I Die walls in 70 countries around the globe.

    https://twitter.com/candychang

    https://www.instagram.com/candychangland/

    https://www.facebook.com/candychangland

    The Bottom Line

    Design is changing faster than ever. New trends are always emerging, and in our opinion, things just keep getting better and better. These 26 women are pushing design to new places we’ve never seen before. This is truly a golden age of design, whether in web, branding, typography, illustration, or photography.

    From 216digital, a hearty THANK YOU to these designers for their willingness to share their work. Keep at it!

    Greg McNeil

    August 17, 2015
    216digital, Applied Ecommerce, Digital Marketing, Ecommerce Platforms, Responsive, SEO
  • Google Plus for Local Business: Getting the Most + For Your Time – EXPANDED

    Google Plus for Local Business: Getting the Most + For Your Time – EXPANDED

    Google Plus: Google’s Gift to Local Area Businesses – EXPANDED

    Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared on 216digital’s Cleveland Plain Dealer blog. It was such a hit there, we’ve expanded this version to include a few more helpful details. 

    Have you noticed that local search has changed? What’s going on? Instead of local business sites alone, Google now shows Google Plus results alongside websites. If you don’t have a Google Plus page, or if your page is in bad shape, it won’t pop up in SERPs (search engine results pages). Whoa. This is serious. Luckily, there’s a lot you can do to optimize Google Plus for local business. In this post, we’ll cover some of the basic techniques, as well as point you towards some in-depth resources.

    Google Plus and SEO: A Little Nepotism Never Hurts!

    The Godfather Holding A Cat Asking, You Gonna Use Google Plus, OK.

    At this point, you’re probably wondering if Google Plus affects your search rank on Google. You bet it does! Claire Abraham, social media manager at 216digital, stresses the importance of Google Plus for SEO to every client we get. As she puts it, “The more of Google’s toys you play with, the more it likes you.” In other words, Google favors its own product, Google Plus, in considering what to show in search results. Now, before you start yelling, “unfair,” consider this: Google is a corporate business entity. As this post from Copyblogger reminds us, Google can do whatever they want. They don’t owe any of us anything! The trick is to figure out what Google likes—and just do it.

    The real gold that Google Plus offers is that G+ pages display in Google search results when the user is logged in to their Google account. This gives users a direct chance to interact with your business’s page if they’re searching for your business or something that you rank for.

    As a social media platform, this is where Google Plus really integrates with SEO efforts. Facebook posts don’t show up in Google SERPs. That puts Google Plus in a great position to integrate your social efforts with your SEO efforts.

    Every social media platform has its own quirks, and Google Plus is no different. It’s not simply Google’s version of Facebook or Twitter. Google Plus is its own space with its own rules and best practices. You’ll need a thorough understanding of how Google Plus works before you start leveraging it for your local business.

    Getting Your Local Business onto Google Plus

    This is easy. Simply sign up for a Google Plus account. One important note—do not use a Gmail address to sign up. Use an address from your business domain name (for example, you@yourdomain.com). This will help greatly when you go to verify your page in the future.

    Linking Google My Business and Google Plus

    While My Business and Google+ are separate Google products, local business owners should link them to get the most out of Google’s presentation of their businesses. For business owners, that means logging into your Google Plus account (or creating one, if you don’t have one), then finding your My Business page and claiming it. Note: you’ll have to verify your business by phone or by postcard. This is critical! An unverified page won’t show up in SERPs.

    Another critical step: you’ll need to determine if there are any duplicate Google My Business pages for your business. If there are, you must delete them. Also, you’ll need to ensure that your My Business page hasn’t been penalized. Duplicate pages and penalties will kill the SEO contributions which your My Business and Google+ pages should be making.

    Your Business Info: Get It Right!

    Seagull With A Speech Bubble Reading, I Went During Your Regular Business Hours, And you Were Closed!

    Just about every point we make in this article is critical. This one is no exception. You mustensure that your business name, address, phone number, and hours of operation are 100% correct. If not every bit of information matches up between your website and your My Business page, Google sees a problem.

    Also, take note of this. As Casey Meraz writes on the Moz blog, you can’t use a PO box as your address, and you can’t list an 800 number as your phone number. If your business has a physical address, you need to list that address. You also need to list a phone number with a local area code.

    You’ll find a Categories field as you’re filling out your profile. This field is extremely important. You’ll want to use all the Categories that are allowed for your industry. Note: these categories reflect what your business is, not what it does. If your business is Dave’s Dry Cleaners, your category would be “Dry Cleaners,” not “dry cleaning.” Also note—there are no custom categories! You have to choose from the available options.

    Your Profile: Complete It!

    An incomplete profile will only hurt your Google Plus page. Make sure you fill out every bit of information until the profile says it’s 100% complete. There’s a lot to do, so pay attention to the details. For example, you need to fill out your intro description. Make sure it’s relevant, engaging, and at least 250 words long. You’ll also want to upload high-quality photos of your business location.

    To really round out your appearance on Google, consider hiring a Google-trusted photographer to do a 360-degree shoot inside your business location. Google calls this Business View, and it’s quite possibly one of Google’s greatest gifts to local businesses. Business View gives online users the chance to see what your restaurant or store looks like on the inside before they even leave the house. This is an especially great opportunity for retail establishments with a unique, well-branded décor.

    Don’t use a Gmail address to sign up. Use an address from your business domain name (like you@yourdomain.com).

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Don’t use a Gmail address to sign up for #GooglePlus. Use an address from your business domain name. #localseo” quote=”Don’t use a Gmail address to sign up. Use an address from your business domain name.”]

    Remember how almost every point in this article is critical? Here’s another one. You need to link your website to your Google Plus page. This will allow your Google Plus page to appear in SERPs.

    Along those lines, you’ll also want to claim a custom URL for your Google Plus page. This is your opportunity to have a URL that matches the name of your business. For both users and Google, this custom URL will look better than a string of numbers and letters.

    You’ll see a section of your profile called Links. You’ll want to put as many relevant links in this area as possible. Relevant links include your blog(s), your social media pages, and any other online properties which make up your business’s digital assets.

    Google Plus Circles

    Colored Pencil Tips In A Circle Around The Google Plus Logo.
    Circles are unique to Google+. Photo courtesy of Horia Varlan, licensed under CC 2.0. Modified by 216digital.

    Among social media platforms, the Circles function is unique to Google Plus. Circles are a way of organizing your connections—say, into groups like Personal Friends, Industry Leaders, and Coworkers. While Circles are primarily a backend organizational feature for your benefit as a user, they do affect your connections: when you post to Google Plus, you can choose which Circles see that post.

    Like many aspects of Google Plus, Circles really have no analog on Twitter and Facebook. As Cassy Hicks Kerr (@modernmktgspark) writes on MMSpark, “The key to building circles is not to focus on the numbers but on the relationships you have with the people you circle.” On Twitter and Facebook, you might try to get as many relevant followers as possible. In Google Plus Circles, it isn’t the number of people in any given Circle that bring you marketing value; rather, it’s the people themselves and their position in your niche. Think of it like “less is more.” You want to get the right people in the right Circles. Rather than a broadcast perspective, trying to hit as many random readers as possible, this is “niche-casting”: hitting a few people in your niche who will find your content insanely valuable.

    In this respect, the structure of Google Plus is far more optimized for digital marketing than the structure of Facebook–or even Twitter.

    Posting to Google Plus

    Google Plus has some quirks. For example, when you post to your Google Plus page, the first 45-50 characters get pulled like a title in SERPs. Weird, right? You’ll just have to work with it. That means writing the first 45-50 characters of your G+ post like a titleand like the first line of a post at the same time.

    If you want to include a link in your Google Plus post (and you should), make sure you use the Link function rather than adding the link manually to your text. This Link function is SEO gold.

    How often should you post to Google Plus? Well… the answer is, “regularly.” We recommend posting every day. However, if this simply isn’t feasible, shoot for once a week. Whatever you do, stick to it.

    Getting Followers on Google Plus

    To get followers, you should join relevant Communities and stay active in them. That means posting every day. However, take note: no one really scrolls through the Google Plus newsfeed like they would on Twitter or Facebook. You can choose which Circles see your posts, thereby targeting your information to the most interested parties. You should take advantage of this function. It will increase the content value of your brand in your followers’ eyes.

    Communities and posting aren’t the only way to gain followers. Social media is all about networking. Since you’re using Google Plus for local business marketing, why not start leaving excellent reviews on the G+ pages of other local businesses? Whether you do this out of the blue, or for a longstanding partner of your business, you can’t measure the value of this act of good will. Don’t be surprised if some businesses reciprocate the favor and start leaving excellent reviews on your page.

    [clickToTweet tweet=”Don’t just dump your email contact list into G+ and invite them all to follow you. #googleplus” quote=”Don’t just dump your email contact list into G+ and invite them all to follow you. “]

    What shouldn’t you do to gain followers on Google Plus? For starters, don’t simply dump your email contact list into G+ and invite them all to follow you. That’s unprofessional, and it’s unlikely every contact in your list will find your business relevant.

    The Bottom Line

    Google Plus is essential to the toolbox of any small business. Like Facebook and Twitter, it offers great social networking opportunities; but unlike them, it also integrates easily with your Google SEO efforts.

    If your small business isn’t using Google Plus yet, sign up now and start interacting with your customers. If you’re already using Google Plus for local business, we want to hear from you. What’s working? What’s not working? Leave a comment below, and let’s continue learning together.

    Greg McNeil

    August 11, 2015
    216digital, Applied Ecommerce, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Google Plus, SEO, Social Media Marketing
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