Why does load time matter?

Load times are just one of the many issues considered in our approach to digital strategy and it’s one the many areas we monitor. From a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view, Google looks at your site’s load time as part of the ranking criteria; slow sites appear further down the results. If your competitor’s site has equal keywords, inbound links and authority, load time could be the deciding factor in who comes first in those precious SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but that’s not the only problem.

A more direct concern than SEO is your customer’s negative response to slow loading pages; if something is slow, they’re gone. Even the big-boys have their own problems when it comes to slow loading pages, as this info indicates:

• At Google, 500 milliseconds of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches
• At Yahoo, 400 milliseconds of extra load time caused a 5-9% increase in the number of people who clicked “back” before the new page even loaded
• At Amazon, 100 milliseconds of extra load time resulted in a 1% drop in sales

That last one is especially informative; if 1/10th of a second delay in a page load time loses 1% of sales at Amazon, imagine the impact of half a second or longer load time could have on your company’s website.

How does your site measure up?

Google analytics & Page Speed Insights will give you an indication of your websites response times and what might be causing delays. Anything over a half-a-second isn’t good. Anything over one second is a big problem.

Slow responses may be (partly) down to poorly-written code or images that aren’t optimised and a few other subtle factors but those can often be quickly ruled out or resolved, leaving us just the hosting as the bottleneck. Most cheap hosting is intended for personal use and sole-trader businesses, only able to handle just a few hundred visitors per month. Some of them are based abroad and the journey is what’s taking the time. If your site uses a CMS and gets more than one or two thousand visitors per month, bargain-basement hosting is not for you. What you need will be down to your own organisation’s requirements so it might be helpful to talk to someone at the hosting company or a web consultant who can help you find the best hosting options answer for your organisation.

We’d like to add our congratulations and best wishes for all of his future ventures.

It’s at events that you’re most likely to engage & impress new potential leads, triggering an interest in your brand. You’ve travelled, made the effort and met people you might want to follow-up with, but the moment they walk out of the room you have lost them… Next time you give a presentation remember that you can also get “likes” via text. All you need to do is ask the audience to text the word “like” and the name of your Facebook Page to 32665 (FBOOK).

You might want to add a slide to your talk, put it on your promotional literature, have a poster on your trade stand or add it to your email signature. If you use QR codes, you can create one that triggers the SMS in the phone so all the person has to do is scan it and press send but remember to offer that as an alternative as it’s now recognised that very few people bother with  QR codes.

You can download a template ready for you add your own Facebook page name by clicking here

The drop in PC shipments showed a continued & increased decline in the first quarter of 2013, with IDC’s report showing shipments of desktop PCs & laptops dropped by 13.9%, while Gartner’s report puts the figure at a slightly less bleak 11.2% drop. Such a big and consistent shift suggests the tablet-powered connected customer is definitely here and gaining in numbers. There is a trend for consumers to “upgrade” to a tablet instead of replacing a home PC, especially in homes with more than one PC.

The connected customer isn’t just about technologies, however, or whether you have a mobile-friendly website; it’s about radical changes in consumer behaviour & expectations. These are the kind of changes that put Blockbuster out of business, and Kodak in trouble, because they didn’t pay attention to the way consumer behaviour has been changing with increased access to digital formats & the internet. This change in consumer behaviour will impact almost everyone’s business models so it’s importnat to pay attention.

We’ve been working with clients to capitalise on the number of online sales attributed to tablets & smartphones for some time, and these connected customers are more likely to use tablets and mobiles to access the web on the move or while watching TV. They use apps, blogs & social networks to influence & inform their decision-making and purchasing behaviour. They watch video on demand and research products & services at times that suit them, not you. The rise of the connected customer is redefining the landscape for customer engagement and changing the trusted old models of who your market is, where they are and how to reach them.

If you don’t already have an understanding of how these connected customers affect your business, it’s time to reconsider your web strategy.

Every once in a while, Google update the API, the software developers use to put maps onto websites. We’re currently up to version 3 of the Google Maps API and have been for some time. Most modern sites are using the latest version, but surprisingly many are still running the old version.

As of May 19th 2013, Google will be switching off support for the old “Version 2 API” causing any site still relying on it to stop working. Most sites built after may 2010 will be unaffected but some sites, especially those websites using content management systems such as WordPress & Drupal, might be using plugins that rely the old API to display Google Maps on your website.

Now, it’s not the end of the world if your map doesn’t display on your contact page, but it’s not good, so we recommend you give your web team a shout and get them to check your site is using the latest Google Maps API. In most cases the cost to upgrade should be negligible but if your site uses custom built Map tools, an upgrade to keep it working could get expensive.

Why did Facebook do this?

Facebook had a couple of problems: Not enough people were using it on their mobile phones and, when they did, they were struggling to push that “relevant” advertising to them.

They toyed with the idea of Facebook Mobile Phone  but making a Facebook-branded phone would not give the company enough reach. It would need an army of handsets to compete with HTC, Samsung, Galaxy, iPhone etc etc and, even then, why would someone sign-up to a two year contract just to get a Facebook phone?

Then they  toyed with making their own operating system (some are mis-reporting Facebook Home is an OS. It isn’t; it’s a suite of Apps for Android) but the OS space is already so dominated by Google’s Android & Apple’s iOS (US Data here) that even the mighty Microsoft and the one-time-emperor of smartphones, Blackberry, struggle to take any ground in that battle. Forking Android was an option, as many manufacturers have already personalised Google’s Android to their own devices but, again, there are issues. In order to install it, your users need to have the technical know-how to install an OS on their phone. Those of us who are technically adept enough to undertake such a task are extremely unlikely to bother doing so, if the only gain is a slightly better Facebook experience.

True, we all wanted to see a Facebook Phone or OS because it’s big and exciting and we like the shiny things but what they’ve actually done is much, much cleverer and far more likely to cane your data plan.

The answer lay in the Apps

Facebook already had apps for the iPhone & Android phones, of course but, despite a recent overhaul of iOS app, both apps were limited and widely accepted to be “a bit pants” when it came to user experience, reliability & performance. They needed something bigger than their existing apps; something that would give them the kind of user-behaviour data they need to fuel their targeted advertising machine. They needed a new idea and Facebook Home is that new idea.

Facebook is already so established and integral to some people that a small but significant portion of Facebook users already think that Facebook IS the internet. The launch of Facebook Home will only reinforce that notion.

Yes, but what is it?

Facebook Home isn’t an OS or a phone or even an app for that matter; it’s a set (or suite) of apps. This suite of apps converts your Android phone into the closest thing to a Facebook Phone you can get. Facebook Home replaces your old home screen and provides a new Facebook branded layer through which to interact. The other apps are still there, of course, but you get to them through the Facebook Home screen. In fact the only way to use your phone now is through the Facebook Home layer.

The Facebook Home suite of apps is only available on Android phones and it’s just feasible that it could be the iPhone killer that apple-haters have been waiting for ( sidestepping the fact that Apple-haters often hate Facebook too ).

Because it’s running all the time and acts as your phone’s main interface it can provide a constant, always-on stream of Facebook updates & messages.  They even provided a handy diagram to explain:

A Kick in the Googles

By taking over the android homescreen in such a fundamental way they have made a successful land-grab of Google’s own turf. It was Google that did all the ground work here, getting their OS installed on millions of phones and tablets to ensure more people used its search, maps & mail services in order to benefit from the advertising & data capture that infers. By taking over the home screen of the device, Facebook has grabbed a chunk of that space and, if it scales this idea intelligently, it could make quite an impact on Google’s business plan for the OS.

The mobile advertising market is a relatively small part of of Google’s business right now but Research firm eMarketer expects U.S. mobile ad spending to grow 77 percent this year to $7.29 billion.

Privacy Concerns

Well, break out the tin foil and make me a hat because Facebook Home is another potential cornucopia of privacy concerns. Some people are extremely bothered about Facebook having access to so much of their personal data, others are less worried, but it’s pretty clear that, in taking over your device so cleverly, Facebook can see which people’s messages you ignore, which apps you use most and (in future) possibly start tracking who you call & text the most, whose calls you ignore, what you browse & buy online and a bazillion other areas of your behaviour to feed into it’s targeted advertising and newsfeed priority algorithms. This is as clever as it is sinister, but nobody at Facebook ever said “Don’t be evil”, and it might mean that you will, finally, start to see the kind of adverts that you want. Of course it might also easily result in the messages from your lesser friends being hidden from you and whole load of other info not shown based on what your phone knows about your habits.

Facebook has a habit of ploughing ahead when it comes to privacy concerns so we’ll have to wait and see what happens there, but it’s going to be an interesting time.

Is it Innovative?

Let’s be honest, Facebook Home is not a revolutionary idea but it is an evolutionary one and sometimes that’s more powerful.  Shops & restaurants have been deploying applications internally for some time, building upon existing mobile technologies to cut costs over proprietary stock-taking, ordering and other systems in the workplace ( companies as diverse as Wagamama and the Harry Potter Studio Tour guide use iPods and custom apps) but Facebook Home is a publicly available version and has the potential to make a big difference to how people use and think about their mobile phone.

Facebook Home will come pre-installed on selected devices from 12 April.

Google’s updates saw an end to many of the over-exploited SEO tactics such as paid links & anchor text over-use. Google became much smarter, apparently able to distinguish between content that “adds real value” to the visitor and content posted solely for SEO purposes. Google, it seems, is taking the idea of “valuable content” seriously. And it can only be a matter of time before the other search engines follow suit.

Of course, the traditional view that good-quality content and inbound links are good for rankings still rings true, and they play an important role in organic search engine rankings, but we’re going to see many more nuanced factors impacting your position on SERPs.

So what should your SEO strategy for the coming year include? Here’s some of the things we’re thinking about:

Unique and information-rich content marketing.

Content marketing is the new black or, as some are saying, the new SEO. Content marketing, when done properly, should add value for the reader and naturally generate backlinks. The difficulty is that businesses have to find a way to generate  high quality content, distribute it widely, with enough social signals to create SEO value… and do it regularly. This is why a solid content marketing strategy will be essential to  your SEO.

Social Signals

Shares, mentions, retweets and Google’s very-own +1s are the golden nuggets everyone will be looking for. While Facebook blocks Google’s access to wall posts, evidence suggests that getting your Facebook page mentioned in retweets and other social signals, especially by those with a decent AuthorRank (see below), is a recognised form of link-building & can affect your ranking, making Social signals another one of the ranking factors to include in your SEO strategy. Despite many writing it off, Google+ is also looking more relevant than ever.

AuthorRank

What’s AuthorRank? I hear you cry… well it’s a Google thing that, basically, assigns authority to specific content creators and it’s probably going to shake things up in a way  few have been expecting. According to the Patent, AuthorRank involves:

The identity of individual agents responsible for content can be used to influence search ratings.

Basically that means that content creators who demonstrate influence in their field will carry more weight than those who don’t. Although evidence of its value is still pending, it’s clear that AuthorRank will become a one of the metrics influencing SERPs. There’s already been a marked increase in Guest Bloggers over recent months, showing that some are already attempting to capitalise on AuthorRank by adding credibility and value to their websites.

Pictures & Video

If you’ve ever used Facebook or Twitter you’ll know how the behaviour pattern works – if it’s got an image or a video you’re much more likely to pay attention. Text-only content flies past, unread but posts with relevant, non-textual media get the clicks, comments & shares. Adding images, sound and/or video to your text-based content adds value, and makes the content “more resourceful”, as well as more likely to generate those much wanted social signals. This applies to all social platforms, including Google+ and Twitter.

These are just a few of the trends we think should be influencing your SEO strategy in the future. If you’d like to know more, get in touch.

Most design agencies are perfectly capable of producing great looking work but, unless they really understand the web, they can often consider issues like those above to be boring, technical problems that get in the way of a nice design when they are, in fact, the foundations upon which all effective websites are built. When push comes to shove, your audience will always choose the site that functioned properly, was easy to use and answered their needs over the most beautiful website that didn’t help them. This is why so many of the most “beautiful” looking websites lose customers every day.

Form Follow Function
Aesthetics are important but a specialised web-designer will understand that all online communications are a balance of functionality, requirements & aesthetics; by placing both the visitor & the business objectives at the centre of the design process, specialist web designers can produce usable, functional and effective web presence that will resonate with your visitors.  In fact, an experienced web-designer is likely to refuse to start designing anything until the site has, at the very least, had it’s content & functionality wire-framed and mapped out.

Similarly, you shouldn’t let the IT department or head of marketing design it for the same reasons – they are thinking about their goals, not the visitor’s.

But even the most experienced and informed web-designer can only ever give you their best-guess, which is why we recommend (and offer the ability) for you to test designs and user journeys to ensure a high standard of usability, conversion-rates, effective calls to action or any number of other issues…

If you’d like to know more at what the web design & multi-variant testing at THBOOM! can do for your business, get in touch.

It was a quick turnaround, compared to our usual work, but it’s fully content managed and built to last, because you’d expect nothing less.