Last year there was a lot of confirmed talk from Google that in the new year, page loading speed would become a ranking factor.  This is something already taken into consideration on the PPC side (quality score is affected by landing page load times) so it’s not surprising to see that it’s coming on the organic side too.

Earlier this week, it was announced – it’s here. In fact, on some data centers, the new ranking factor has been in place for several weeks. Now it’s across the board.  So if you’re seeing your rankings slip, it may be time to take a good hard look at your site and see where it’s slow.  Read more...

As the person in charge of our sales team at Canada’s Web Shop I never thought I would say that “Losing a sale can be good sometimes”.  This may sound perplexing but a while back we lost a deal that I really wanted and thought we should have won.   Instead of getting mad (or after getting mad) I took a long look  at our presentation format and analyzed all the information we were communicating to our prospect and I have to admit I made some pretty major tweaks in our presentation process and the message we were communicating.  Read more...

I had an interesting experience the other day at lunch time.  We just had a bakery / deli re-open next to our building and I thought I would try it out.  I was short on  time and wanted to get back to work as I had been out of the office all morning.  I entered the bakery and it was busy, the till looked like it was ran by a slow employee, I could not see the sandwich menu as it was way at the back behind the counter.  So I thought to myself, I don’t have time for this I am going to go to the Fyxx right across the street from us where I have been before and I know what I will have.  When I got back to the office I asked the question to my staff do you think that online surfing is affecting the way we see and react to mortor locations.  I immediately thought at the bakery / deli that it was similar to going to a frustrating website, it was slow and it was not telling me what I wanted to know in a fast manner – sound familiar.  Then one of our staff made a good comment, he said the reason you can leave a website easily is because there is no commitment, you are just surfing.  Usually when you go to a mortar store you have made a commitment to drive there or walk there, the difference in my situation was I had not committed a lot of my time and I could easily go to another lunch spot literally 30 seconds away.  So remember having a friendly, fast, easy to navigate website that tells you what you want to know quickly is always going to be important – in our world this is called conversion consulting – ensuring all elements are set up properly to ensure a low bounce rate (defined as: A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software).  Similarly if you are in a mortar business where there is low commitment (fast food in a shopping mall is a good example) try to make it as easy as possible and quick as possible for visitors to purchase from you much like a website and I would guess that sales will increase.