Kristine Schachinger (www.siteswithoutwalls.com) has been a consultant for AOL, Department of Homeland Security, Reba McEntire, Superpages.com, and USA.gov. Kristine shared her expert knowledge about web strategy, and how companies need to lay down foundations first before anything else.
“You don’t want to be the player who goes where the puck is not going – you want to be where the puck is going to be”
Everything in the last year has changed dramatically. A year or two ago someone had not even talked about responsive design
In terms of SEO – Google has changed how the algorithm has changed – as far as TOS is concerned, and now adds usability, spam and other things – are you watching your website, controlling your website?
Web strategy
What is web strategy?
- Simple as it is complex
- How we reach our website and business goals
- The devil is in the complexity of the details
You need people to understand what is going on with all aspects of your strategy
How do we define a strategy?
If you don’t know why you are creating something you are likely to fail. You need to know what you are doing and why or you are not going to do it correctly – what you are doing must answer all the questions you need
- Who are your users
- What tech and devices are you using
Don’t just do something because you hear a buzz word – have purpose
- Techology and devices – what are they using
- Geolocation – speed design, language
- Gender – site design, advertising
- Age – accessibliy
- Income – how you target
- Education – content level of writing
- Browsers/platforms
Biggest mistake that site owners make is they think the user is like them – find out who they are what they want and why they use your website
Most sites are not 90% women (Pinterest) – KNOW your users
- Where are your users where are they when they access your site
- Work travel shopping home, mobile, what time of day etc
- Don’t’ follow what everyone eles is doing know what is right for you
So why do we do this? So our strategy is not based on guesswork and hunches but data and fact and understanding our users.
What happens if you don’t get this?
If a user hates your site 90% will never return
3 milliseconds for trust – 1-3 seconds to decide if they are going to use your site
- Homepage pathing – Make sure your homepage is a clear path for your users to get what they need while supporting your business goals – you got 3 clicks – make em count
- Site Architecture – it should be hard to decide how your site is going to be navigated – be clear, direct, simle – only 7 or 8 things can be handled by users so consider this before you consider info overload
- Content Development – what is the strategy – how will you maintaint it who is in charge of it?
- How will you integrate your seo team?
- Write for maximum relevant traffic – authorship and identy
Social Media Strategy
What is your voice – how do you handle your employee accounts – what is the reason for your social media and purpose behind each one – engage participate and give out info of use to your clients
Usability – this will become a Google Algo check
Technology
- Does your website have more than one homepage
- Robots txt
- Sitemap
- Page speed
- Page weight
- url contstructin
- scripting
Just because it is cool doesn’t mean you should
Where is the SEO
Everything is SEO now – everything will affect SEO values and strategies – bring in the team earlier – at the beginning of the build
SEO doesn’t need a new name but maybe we should call it Search Experience Optimisation
Optimise for the entire experience
What Else?
Search Engines
- Social Media integration
- Device
- Chaos
- Mobile s everything else
- Schema
Where is the puck going?
- Google Glass
- Identity – authorship tag
- Search without search
- Device entropy
- Non website based data presentation
- Content API
- Identity for SEO
- True Linguistic Search
If your site is not a clean responsibly designed schema tagged fighting machine you need to catch up!
Know who your author is – check the history – with that pattern so they are looking at identy