Reading Time: < 1 minIn most projects, you need to get a handful of people involved to get their input. The more you can front-load that input, the more smoothly things will go. As shared by Seth Godin in his book “Linchpin“: “The point of getting everyone involved early is simple: thrash late and you won’t ship. Thrash late […]
Websites
Customers are mostly done with their research before they even reach out to you
Reading Time: < 1 minIt’s fun to build a website and think about all of the people that will come to your site to do their research about your product. It certainly happens, but it’s far less often than you might think. In Kara Smith Brown’s book “The Revenue Engine” she shares this bit of data about B2B buyers: […]
Branded searches are taking over Google
Reading Time: < 1 minAs time has gone on, and our search engine patterns have changed, a big new trend is beginning to emerge: people are using Google for branded searches more than ever before. Put another way, people are searching for “Nike” instead of “best running shoes”, or “GreenMellen” instead of “web design companies in Atlanta”. People are […]
Users with disabilities are visiting your website
Reading Time: < 1 minIt’s getting increasingly difficult to track how users are finding your website, but there is one thing I can guarantee — users with disabilities are visiting your site, and you should be prepared to serve them accordingly. I was talking with a (now former) client a few years ago, urging her to do more work […]
The WordPress drama shows why WordPress remains the best choice
Reading Time: 2 minOver the last few months, the WordPress community has been a bit of a mess. The short version of the “mess” is that Matt Mullenweg (the man behind WordPress) is not happy with WP Engine (a major host of WordPress sites) and it’s causing a lot of fallout. My friend Aaron has a great timeline […]
97% of web pages get zero traffic from Google
Reading Time: 2 minThings are changing quickly when it comes to getting your site to rank well on Google. A big one, as I shared a few months ago, is that 64% of visitors that use Google never end up visiting a traditional website, instead getting the answer from Google itself or from a related Google product (Maps, […]
The evolution of websites
Reading Time: 2 minThe internet is changing rapidly, thanks to big shifts in social media and the ongoing wave of AI. Websites have largely remained the same in recent years, staying strong as the home for every business on the internet. I don’t think that will be changing anytime soon, but the nature of the sites themselves may […]
Creating “zero click” content
Reading Time: 2 minAs I mentioned a few weeks ago, a growing problem with Google is the number of “zero click” searches on there — searches that don’t lead to another click, because Google answered the question for you. It’s generally a good thing for users, but it’s a bad thing for companies wanting to get more website […]
The majority of Google searches don’t lead to websites
Reading Time: 2 minIt’s a trend that has been growing for years, but the number of “zero-click” searches on Google continues to grow (where a zero-click search is one where the user doesn’t ever click through to a website). In a recent post on the SparkToro blog, Rand Fishkin points out that in 2024 only 360 of every […]
All of your old Google Analytics data will vanish on July 1
Reading Time: < 1 minIn the last move of Google’s weird switch from “Universal Analytics” (“UA”, the Google Analytics that everyone has used for years) to “Google Analytics 4” will happen in just a few weeks. For those not familiar with this, Google Analytics is software used to track information about your website visitors, and Google made a massive […]