What is A/B Testing?

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing (or split testing) is mentioned again and again in the world of digital marketing, but what is it?

This can be an incredibly powerful part of optimizing your website and boosting your conversions. Performing an A/B test lets you compare two versions of a web page to identify which one works best.

This involves presenting the two pages to visitors at the same time, and whichever achieves higher conversion rates becomes the final version.

A/B testing gives you the power to make the most of your current traffic, and it can be applied to virtually any element of your website which impacts visitors’ behavior. This includes your headlines, sub headlines, testimonials, text in paragraphs, images, links, and more.

After all, Google is used to perform billions of searches each month, and you need to do everything you can to grab prospects’ attention.

 

Gathering Key Data

Before you run your A/B testing, you need to gather data that will ultimately help you identify the strongest variation.

Visitors’ behavior is one area to focus on, and certain tools can show obstacles that might prevent conversions or cause prospects to click away. For example, uninformative text which is too clustered together for comfortable reading, unattractive images, or an unclear CTA button can all contribute to a lack of conversions.

After exploring the results of such analysis, you would then be able to see where a potential new page would have to go. If you have problems with your CTA button or your text’s layout, you can create a new one with the same content presented differently.

If you can establish which of your options has the power to make a stronger impact on visitors, you should be able to increase conversions and build your user-base.

 

Trial and Error

It’s vital to make both variations as high-quality as possible, and give both a fair chance. Don’t be tempted to effectively sabotage one version of a page if you prefer the other, because what you prefer might not necessarily match your audience’s tastes.

A/B testing allows you to try different styles and presentation formats too. For example, if you feel your copy may be a little bland, your B page can be quirkier and funnier. If you find this garners fewer conversions during your sample period than the A page, you could perhaps try another new version that resembles the original more.

You can try again and again over time, eliminating less-successful variations and gathering data from the best to transform your site.

At Nett Solutions, our Orange County SEO team is passionate about helping businesses just like yours maximize your visibility, boost conversions, and ultimately achieve higher rankings. Give us a call now to see what we can do for you!

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SEO Trends to Watch Out for in 2018

SEO Trends to Watch Out for in 2018

 As we come to the end of another year, it’s time to think about what we can expect to see in the next.  2018 looks to be a big year for changes in the world of SEO, and it’s best to prepare for them now to stay ahead of the curve.

So, what’s in store?

 

The Future is Mobile

Mobile is a major player in SEO, with the approaching mobile-first index meaning that Google will look for mobile content before desktop.

Businesses should have been optimizing their content for mobile devices for a few years now, but as more and more of us browse the internet on our smartphones and tablets, this takes on a greater urgency

Mobile-friendly sites stand a better chance of ranking ahead of non-friendly domains, and local SEO will become more important in 2018 to help businesses target customers on the go. Expect to see more Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in the next 12 months.

 

Greater Focus on Voice Search

Voice search has been on the rise in recent years, with almost half of American adults using it every day, and it will only become more important to effective SEO campaigns in 2018.

You need to focus more on natural language and long-tail keywords to cater to voice-searchers’ conversational approach.

 

Feeling the Need, the Need for Speed

Making your site’s pages load as quickly as possible will be more imperative in 2018.

Speed is a key ranking signal and makes a significant impact on your visitors’ user experience (UX). Pages should load within three seconds to minimize the risk of chasing customers away to faster alternatives.

What can you do to make your pages load faster? Try making your images smaller, assess whether all of your plugins are really necessary, and look into compressing your content. All of this can make a big difference to your site’s UX, on mobile and desktop devices.

 

Visual Search will Become More Visible

The popularity of visual search will rise in 2018. Google Lens, the giant’s visual-search app for their own Pixel smartphones, enables users to aim it at a piece of visual information (such as a shop sign) and retrieve details on its business hours, reviews, and more.

People want to look at products, locations, venues, and more rather than just taking a business’s word. More companies will have to embrace the power of visuals, creating strong branding, product, and service images across their sites.

 

Machines, Learning, and RankBrain

Machine learning will play a bigger role in SEO throughout 2018, as the RankBrain algorithm continues to refine Google’s search queries. This aims to provide users with the most relevant results possible and avoid directing them to pages of little value.

RankBrain studies how users are looking for information and across which devices. Businesses need to focus on making their content as relevant and valuable to visitors as they can, without any of the shortcuts black-hat SEO practitioners used to rely upon.

 

NettSolutions, an Orange County digital marketing agency, can help your business’s SEO reach all-new heights in 2018 — and beyond. Give us a call to learn more!

 

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5 Must-Have Features for Every Business Website

5 Must-Have Features for Every Business Website

A staggering 46% of small businesses are operating without a website, but 24% plan to build one in the near future.

Today, every company needs a website that caters to your customers’ exact needs. Any prospect looking for information on your business, ethics, products, shipping process, and anything else they could possibly need to know before buying should be able to find it.

Which features must be on your website?

 

Social Media Integration

Social media is critical for every business. It allows you to market to existing and prospective customers, and reach a wider demographic. After all, 22 percent of the planet’s population is on Facebook, while over 50 million companies have Facebook Business Pages.

Beyond Facebook, 93 percent of Pinterest’s users plan or make purchases, and 88 percent of companies use Twitter as a marketing tool.

Add buttons to your website and enable visitors to check out your social pages with just a click. This helps to boost engagement and is invaluable as a fast customer-service tool.

 

Multiple Contact Channels

If customers go to your ‘contact us’ page only to find an email address or an international phone number (with expensive charges), they may well be put off. It appears unprofessional and suggests your business has little interest in receiving feedback.

Provide users with email addresses (one for product queries, one for complaints), local phone numbers, and live chat. This latter option is vital today, providing a free chance to exchange text-based messages with support agents in real-time.

 

High-End Security

Never take security for granted. For businesses handling online transactions, an SSL certificate will show customers that you take their safety seriously, and all critical details (credit card numbers, bank-account numbers etc.) are encrypted.

With an SSL certificate, a tiny green padlock will appear to the left of your HTTPS URL. Today’s online consumers are security-savvy, so invest in the best you can.

 

Clear, Logical Navigation

Make navigating your website as quick, simple, and logical as possible. Use clear names for pages in your tabs and site maps (About, Contact, FAQ etc.), and use calls to action to help visitors find the most important pages, such as specific product catalogs or live chat.

Imagine yourself as a customer visiting your website for the first time. Where would you want to go first? Would you be able to get their with your current design? Explore the site with this mindset and make note of any potential problems.

 

A Comprehensive FAQ

A variety of contact channels is key, as we mentioned above. However, add an FAQ to your website so visitors can help themselves before having to get in touch with your support team.

Again, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What would you want to know? List as many questions as you can think of, and then add any others being asked on a regular basis.

 

At Nett Solutions, we’re a leading Orange County digital marketing agency. If you want to know more about boosting engagement and maximizing your online performance, give us a call now.

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SEO Audit Checks

3 New SEO Audit Checks for 2017 And Beyond

Regular SEO audits are essential for every website. This relates to all of the elements that are integral to your domain’s visibility, and a thorough audit may well improve your performance.

An SEO audit will let you examine why you may be struggling to achieve the SEO results you hope for. You can identify the weakest aspects of your campaign, giving you the information you need to formulate a new direction. You should aim to perform a full SEO audit in each quarter, or whenever you feel your progress has stalled.

If the time has come to run an SEO audit on your website, here are three new checks for 2017 – and beyond!

 

Run an Audit on your Internal Links

Your internal links help to establish your site’s architecture: you want to have relevant pages connected to each other, to help increase your ranking and ensure users can navigate your site in a logical way.

Wikipedia is testament to the power of good internal links, and helps explain how that site manages to retain such authority: practically each page on Wikipedia is packed with relevant, organic links to other pages right across the site.

If you haven’t performed an audit on your internal links, make sure you do this from now on.

Your keywords should be scattered across your site’s content organically, rather than clustered together. Your anchor text should use high-quality keywords, and pages linked together have to be related (directing a user to an irrelevant page may chase them away).

Your most important pages should always be within three clicks of your homepage, while any broken links have to be fixed (or replaced) immediately.

 

Check Indexing

When search engines index your website, they collate information on its relevancy and quality. Effective internal links are vital to help search engine crawlers navigate your site properly, to avoid missing any important pages.

Part of running an SEO audit on your site is deciding which of your pages are meant to be indexed and which should be left alone. Any pages lacking valuable content, such as your terms and conditions, should be excluded from the indexing project. Duplicate content needs to be left out of the indexing process, too.

You can tell crawlers to exclude a specific page by creating a ‘no index’ meta tag to said page’s HTML code.

 

Make Sure Your Site’s Mobile-Friendly

Every website has to be mobile-friendly today, given that Google has started indexing mobile domains rather than desktop ones. As a result, you need to make sure your website is optimized for mobiles as a priority.

You can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test application to evaluate your site’s compatibility, and identify any major weaknesses. You should also track your mobile rankings, and consider switching to AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages).

These are pared-down, lightweight pages designed to load within 8 seconds. These run without certain elements found in standard HTML, such as submission forms and JavaScript.

 

Want to know more about how an SEO audit can boost your online visibility? Get in touch with Nett Solutions – we’re an Orange County SEO agency ready and willing to help!

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Google & Tiffany’s… two peas in a pod

Some things in life are best left simple and pure.  According to my wife, some examples are: Tiffany’s blue, a simple black cocktail dress, a kiss goodnight, her favorite pair of jeans, a baby sleeping and a classic Chanel handbag.  Yes, she used the “handbag” card one week before Valentine’s day… and no, I don’t plan on buying her one.  My list of things that are beautiful in their simplicity?  USC Football jerseys (apologies to my UCLA co-workers), cheeseburgers, ‘65 Shelby fastback Mustang, backyard BBQ’s and that 15 year-old, hole-ridden, one-size-too-small,  favorite t-shirt that the wife always tries to throw away.

All these things reveal beauty in their classic, timeless, simple states. A major contributing factor in Google’s rise to dominance has been their ability to grasp the fact that people can indeed find beauty in simplicity.  It is widely believed that the average American is targeted by over 3000 ads and exposed to hundreds of them on a daily basis.  Ad space dominates our surroundings and it is no different in the online realm.   In a cyberworld cluttered with advertisements and widgets, Google continues to exercise its motto to “think backwards” by displaying beauty in simplicity.  I noticed a recent change in the Google search page.  Traditionally, the page would look something like this:

 

Google simplified things even further by removing all the peripheral links to reveal a pure, clean, simple search page:

 

The peripheral links in the image above don’t appear until you take action by moving the mouse over the page.  You can call it the anti-AOL or the contra-Yahoo!.  I simply call it beautiful.  Note that I am speaking purely from a search perspective.  A company like Yahoo! finds its strength in their network/portal.  When it comes to search, Google continues to deliver by sticking to one of their 10 philosophical pillars:  “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.”  That one thing is Search and the newest change to the homepage embodies this philosophy.

We often speak to e-commerce businesses who try to jazz up their site with way too much text, animation, dizzying color patterns, or overwhelming ads.  It should be well noted that potential customers and site visitors want to find the info they are searching for quickly and easily.  Simple, clean pages do wonders for website conversions, visitor satisfaction, and bounce rates.  The next time you give your site a facelift, I encourage you to take a lesson from Google and consider the ‘less is more’ approach.   You can always give us a call so we can discuss strategies for your website.

While we’re on the subject of Google ads, I hope you were able to catch the Parisian Love Super Bowl ad this past weekend.  I tend to judge Super Bowl commercials by watching faces of the viewers around me rather than how I personally react.  I noticed the faces of the viewers at the Super Bowl party were absolutely intrigued by this commercial and actually enjoyed watching it.  There was no humor, celebrity spokesman, or special effects.  It was simple yet captivating… how fitting of Google. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYavikKP8wI

On a personal note, this commercial is the one that got my vote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rsEnwKrsvc

  • Michael

Nett Solutions is a SEM agency working with Yahoo! and Google.  We are a SoCal based company built of an eclectic cornucopia of:  marketers, mothers & fathers, husbands & wives, college grads & MBA’s, surfers, church-goers, athletes, comedians (and those who think they are comedians).  Our common bond is that we like to help people succeed.

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It’s a new year with new mountains to climb.

This is a fun and interesting time to begin a new blog series.  The first two months of the calendar year always excites me because its earnings season, the aggregate holiday sales numbers are posted, the Super Bowl ads are creating buzz, many New Year’s resolutions broken by now, and the New Year generally marks a fresh start for everyone.    This new blog is designed to address current events in a way that is informative and applicable to small & medium sized businesses.    

As an internet marketing company we feel a high level of responsibility towards not just creating a good ad campaign, but also helping our clients succeed in their day to day business operations.  We have the opportunity to speak with 100’s of new SMB’s every week.  This allows us the ability to keep a finger on the pulse of the American business environment and offer fun & interesting blog topics that pertain to all aspects of the business.  I understand words like inflation, recession, and unemployment raise barriers when making business decisions.  I am faced with these similar decisions on a daily basis.  At the same time we believe there is opportunity all around us.  Our goal is to help businesses continue to grow during these challenging times. 

On a personal note, I believe in people.   I believe the small and medium sized American businesses must spearhead the charge out of this recession.  I believe American’s may not have greater dreams that those in other countries… but I believe we live in a country that provides the best platform to achieve those dreams.   Our passion is to use advertising and marketing to make dreams happen.

  • – Michael Won

Nett Solutions is an SEM working with Yahoo! and Google.  We are a SoCal based company built of an eclectic cornucopia of:  marketers, mothers & fathers, husbands & wives, college grads & MBA’s, surfers, church-goers, athletes, comedians (and those who think they are comedians).  Our common bond is that we like to help people succeed.

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Why Choose Nett Solutions over other Search Engine Marketing Solutions?

Search Engine Marketing has a wide array of choices to get you noticed, however no other solution can guarantee position AND cost.  Having such a simple, straightforward solution means you can get back to your real business and not worry where and when your ad is showing up!

What can you expect with NettSolutions?

  • Positioning in 1st , 2nd or 3rd Sponsored Placements 24/7
  • 12 Month Rate Guarantee
  • Month-to-Month Contract – 3 month minimum
  • First Right for Placement Renewal
  • Custom Descriptions – With the ability to change these
  • Unlimited Clicks
  • No Need for Costly & Complex Management
  • Positioning where the vast majority of Clicks Occur
  • Monthly Billing
  • Ability to upgrade package at any time
  • Exceptional Service – Always.


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