A new survey of US consumers has some surprising findings about what customers expect out of business websites.

The results from 1,013 respondents between the ages of 18-60 show that consumers have high expectations when it comes to how frequently your website is updated, what features are implemented, and how you are advertising your business online.

What Consumers DON’T Want in a Website

Of the respondents, more than 80% say they view a brand more negatively if their website is out of date. Additionally, 39% of consumers say they would reconsider buying a product or service if the website isn’t current.

The issue of advertising is also a prickly subject for consumers, based on the survey results.

Less than 10% approved of brands showing ads on social media based on a person’s browsing activity. Meanwhile, approximately 26% feel negatively about ads appearing on their social media feeds based on their browsing or device history – saying it is an invasion of privacy.

On the other hand, 41% of consumers say they don’t mind if websites keep personal data, but only if it is secured on used exclusively to improve the user experience.

Overall, consumers are largely conflicted. Approximately 50% of respondents say that they like the convenience of brands keeping data for to improve ads and user experience, but they are concerned about how else it might be used.

What Consumers DO Want in a Website

In general, consumers say ease of use should be the top priority in making their online experience better.

Approximately 50% of the respondents said they prefer user-created content like reviews and photos to help inform their purchasing decision.

Meanwhile, 25% say their favorite website feature is receiving a reminder when they have left a product in their shopping cart.

Perhaps surprisingly, a major feature desired by users is an on-site search engine. Nearly one-third of respondents say they are put-off if a site does not have a search box, while more than 40% say a search box is the most important feature on a site.


The survey includes a number of interesting findings about consumer behavior and desires online covering a wide range of topics. You can read all the details from Blue Fountain Media here.

 

LinkedIn is working to make itself a worthwhile advertising platform for brands, and that includes launching new targeting options for advertisers.

Starting over the next week, advertisers will be able to target ads on LinkedIn based on users’ professional interests and behavior.

As the company says in their announcement:

“We’re excited to announce interest targeting in Campaign Manager. Interest targeting lets you reach members with relevant ads that match their professional interests — based on the content they share and engage with on LinkedIn. With these added options, you can more easily achieve your campaign objectives and grow your business.”

You can target your ads based on over 200 categories such as artificial intelligence, global economy, and customer experience.

Specifically, LinkedIn says brands can benefit from Interest Targeting in a few ways:

  • Serve relevant ads and content that match a member’s professional interests. Interest targeting can help you shape brand perception with different professional audiences by associating your brand with the topics that they care about. For example, if you sell Cloud Computing services, you can target members interested in “cloud computing” and create a campaign with Sponsored Content ads that show how your solution is helping business do more with their data.
  • Deepen your influence with the buyer committee within your target accounts. Today, many of our customers use LinkedIn’s powerful account targeting to inform their Account-Based Marketing campaigns. Now you can kick it up a notch by using account targeting along with interest targeting to reach an audience of potential buyers who have already expressed, or are likely to express, an interest in the content that’s relevant to your business.
  • Reach those interested in pursuing a certificate program. You can also use a combination of degrees and interests to reach the audiences who would be a naturally fit for higher education programs.

Interest Targeting is currently rolling out on LinkedIn and is expected to be available to all advertisers within the next week.

Twitter wants to help you plan out your marketing for the year with a new, free calendar with tips and ideas for your 2019 marketing strategies.

The calendar identifies the biggest, most hotly anticipated events of the year so you can plan your marketing ahead of time.

Additionally, Twitter provides some extra motivation to tweet during these big events with an estimate of the number of Tweet impressions each event is expected to draw.

The calendar doesn’t just highlight the obvious holidays like Christmas or Valentine’s day, either. It includes niche holidays such as Talk Like a Pirate Day, major sporting events like the March Madness final game, and cultural events like Coachella.

No matter what industry you are in, you are bound to find exciting opportunities to make your mark somewhere among the major and minor events.

For example, running accessory brands may plan their marketing around some of the major marathons included on the calendar – like the Boston Marathon which is predicted to drive an estimated 73 million tweet impressions.

Meanwhile, bars or restaurants may be more interested in taking advantage of the quickly approaching National Pizza Day on February 9th and National Margarita Day on February 22th, which are estimated to inspire 34 million and 14 million tweet impressions respectively.

View and download Twitter’s 2019 Marketing Calendar here.

GoDaddy is one of the most popular hosting providers for small businesses, but it appears the hosting service may also be making changes to sites on its platform which could significantly slow or break sites entirely.

The service is injecting a piece of JavaScript code as part of its Real User Metrics (RUM) technology, which allows the service to track and measure the performance of websites. However, none of this information is provided to the sites on GoDaddy’s service in the form of analytics but is instead used solely by the company to improve systems and server configurations.

With this in mind, it is hard to see any benefit to continue allowing GoDaddy to install code for RUM on your site.

All US GoDaddy customers agree to opt-in to using RUM as part of the terms of service and the company does little to inform you of how it uses the technology. In a help document, the company also concedes it may have a negative impact on websites:

“Most customers won’t experience issues when opted-in to RUM, but the javascript used may cause issues including slower site performance, or a broken/inoperable website.

If you’re using Google’s AMP, you have pages ending with multiple ending tags, or your site performance is slower, you may want to opt-out of RUM.”

Considering how important site speed is to both search engines and actual consumers, it is highly likely RUM could be costing you traffic AND conversions.

Thankfully it is easy to opt-out of the RUM service if GoDaddy is your hosting provider. Just follow these steps:

  • Access your cPanel hosting account by going logging in to your cPanel and clicking on your hosting account.
  • Click the three-dot menu button, and then click “Help us.”
  • Click “Opt out.”

Once this is done, the code will be immediately removed from your site.

A lot of people have come to think of search engine optimization and content marketing as separate strategies these days, but Google’s John Mueller wants to remind webmasters that both are intrinsically linked. Without great content, even the most well-optimized sites won’t rank as high as they should.

The discussion was brought up during a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout where one site owner asked about improving rankings for his site.

Specifically, he explained that there were no technical issues that he could find using Google’s tools and wasn’t sure what else he could do to improve performance.

Here’s the question that was asked:

“There are zero issues on our website according to Search Console. We’re providing fast performance in mobile and great UX. I’m not sure what to do to improve rankings.”

Mueller responded by explaining that it is important to not forget about the other half of the equation. Just focusing on the technical details won’t always lead to high rankings because the content on the site still needs to be relevant and engaging for users.

The best way to approach the issue, in Mueller’s opinion, is to ask what issues users might be having with your products or services and what questions they might ask. Then, use content to provide clear and easily available answers to these questions.

In addition to these issues, Mueller noted that some industries have much stronger competition for rankings than others. If you are in one of these niches, you may still struggle to rank as well as you’d like against competition which has been maintaining an informative and well-designed site for longer.

You can read or watch Mueller’s answer in full below, starting at 32:29 in the video:

“This is always kind of a tricky situation where you’re working on your website for a while, then sometimes you focus on a lot of the technical details and forget about the bigger picture.

So what I would recommend doing here is taking your website and the queries that you’re looking [to rank] for, and going to one of the webmaster forums.

It could be our webmaster forum, there are lots of other webmaster forums out there where webmasters and SEOs hang out. And sometimes they’ll be able to look at your website and quickly pull out a bunch of issues. Things that you could be focusing on as well.

Sometimes that’s not so easy, but I think having more people look at your website and give you advice, and being open to that advice, I think that’s an important aspect here.

Another thing to keep in mind is that just because something is technically correct doesn’t mean that it’s relevant to users in the search results. That doesn’t mean that it will rank high.

So if you clean up your website, and you fix all of the issues, for example, if your website contains lots of terrible content then it still won’t rank that high.

So you need to, on the one hand, understand which of these technical issues are actually critical for your website to have fixed.

And, on the other hand, you really need to focus on the user aspect as well to find what are issues that users are having, and how can my website help solve those issues. Or help answer those questions.”

Instagram has launched a new feature that makes it possible to share posts across multiple accounts simultaneously. Currently only available to iOS users, the feature allows account managers to share a post to two or more of their accounts without the need for duplicating posts or creating multiple versions for each account.

“We are rolling out this feature to provide a better experience for people who often post to multiple accounts,” explained a spokesperson for Instagram.

If you have a business with multiple locations or individual brands for specific services, you likely can already see the utility of the new feature. In the past, to post across several accounts you controlled, you would essentially have to recreate the same post multiple times or use third-party tools to create and schedule your posts.

Now, you can save the time and effort by selecting the “Post to other accounts” option when creating a new post. From there, you simply have to toggle which accounts you would like to share the content on.

It also means that brands who aren’t using third-party social management tools can now effectively manage their multiple pages from directly within the Instagram app.

Unfortunately for Android users, Instagram hasn’t given any indication when the feature might be available outside of iOS devices.

 

Google has allowed users to message businesses through their Google My Business listings since July of last year, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing. The prompt is typically just a small button that can be easily overlooked among all the information filling up a GMB listing.

Now, however, it appears the search engine is testing a more prominent button option within local listings.

Search Engine Land columnist Joy Hawkins shared a screenshot on Twitter of the new button, which is hard to miss when you open up a listing’s profile.

For comparison, here is what the interface normally looks like.

You’ll notice the small “message” icon next to the call, directions, and website icons.

While it is just a small tweak that might not ever make it out of the testing phase, it indicates that Google may be looking into new ways to promote the use of Google’s messaging tools.

Currently, the brands utilizing Google’s messaging features are in the minority. But, with the increasing popularity of using Facebook messenger for business pages, it is possible that brands could begin to make better use of Google’s online messaging and text messaging features.