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marți, 27 august 2013

Comparing the Google+ and Google Places Page Management Interfaces

Posted: 26 Aug 2013 04:23 PM PDT

Caveat: I am definitely not a professional interface designer; this task I leave largely to the experts on our UX & Design team. My goal behind this post is to increase usage of Places for Business, however, and raise the visibility of that destination among the small-business-focused marketing community.

Setting aside the difficulty that Google had integrating Zagat into its product mix, its own branding difficulties in the Local space have been well-chronicled. Following the zigzag from Local to Maps to Places to Places-with-Hotspot, back to just Places, then to Plus-Local, and (finally?) plain ol' Plus has been like observing a misguided exercise in corporate alligator escapism.

Although the result of this hodgepodge of brands appears largely the same to consumers, who probably weren't all that keyed into the evolution anyway, Google's ill-defined brand in Local has almost certainly been a contributing factor to its deficit in business owner engagement relative to Facebook.

It's just not clear to the average brick-and-mortar business owner, let alone the average SEO, where she should go to get started at Google. While Google's "first responders" in the support forums have been darned consistent in their mantra of using Places for Business to manage this presence, this destination gets very little love in Google's mainstream advertising â€" or even AdWords. It's impossible to get to from Google's primary business-oriented pages, and a number of searches (including "Google Plus Local Page") return this answer.

Which is a shame, because the Plus management interface offers a vastly inferior experience for business owners. Although I recommended it last year, here's why I no longer encourage business owners (or SEOs) to use it, and why I've come around to places.google.com.

The deficiencies of the Google+ page management interface

1. No UI hierarchy

This interface is a jumble of Pinterest-like modules, with none more or less important than the others. If I were to answer my own question ("What am I supposed to look at?"), my natural inclination would seem to be the big green box in the middle â€" "Start a video call with your followers." Hardly something the average business owner is going to have time for or get any value out of.

Meanwhile, attributes that are core to a business's success (categories, hours, location information) are hidden behind a white-on-white button, and my natural primary activity (posting as my business rather than as myself) is easy to miss when juxtaposed alongside the "green monster." It's no wonder that even LinkedIn beats Google+ for social sharing.

2. Mis-targeting the average SMB

The eager-beaver SMBs who explore the navigation beyond the first page are likely to find themselves pretty lost. They're asked to install plugins, buttons, and even connect to the Google APIs console (while being consoled that it's only a 3-step process). Something like 50% of this audience doesn't even have a website, and 90% doesn't even have a mobile website, for goodness sake.

3. Slightly misleading insights

The Places dashboard hasn't exactly been a paragon of useful information, but my main complaint with this tab is presentation, rather than data. There's actually quite a bit of useful information here, but unfortunately it's hidden in the default view. "Actions" and "Views" are presented flatly, where a view of a post is treated with the same importance as a click for driving directions or into a business's website. So a business is likely to miss out on what are actually some pretty important metrics, or at least see some inflated numbers.

4. No help

The only way to get help with this far-from-simple product is to click first into settings, and then into "Learn More" on the section that you're interested in.

The strengths of the Places management interface

1. Extremely clear messaging

Strong calls to action pop right off the page here: the green-backgrounded "Complete your business information," the blue-backgrounded "Edit information," and even the boringness of the grayed-out "Add photo" area all point directly to what Google and the SMB are both trying to accomplish with this product.

2. Perfect targeting of the average SMB

It's evident that the designers of the Places Dashboard have spent plenty of time watching business owners using their product. Clicking the question mark just once brings up tooltips alongside all the major sections of the tool. Not only does this decrease the number of questions Google is likely to receive from business owners, but it answers those questions in a clear, friendly tone that gives less-sophisticated owners a great first impression of Google's products.

3. Clear(er) insights

This simplistic interface is very transparent about the data it's showing (number of times this listing appeared in a local search result), and presents a much more representative view of a business's presence at Google (my page only has 3 actions) without overcomplicating the situation for the business owner.

4. Terrific tooltips and inline help text

Here's where the experience of the Places team really shines through: They don't take any pre-existing knowledge of how business listings work for granted, walking the business owner through every step of the page-creation process.

5. Phone support (!)

And of course, if a business owner isn't able to figure things out on their own, there are plenty of relevant links directly to the most-commonly asked questions, and the process highlights Google's revolutionary option of phone support.

Conclusion

Given how much effort has been put into the Local Business Center / Places for Business Dashboard over the last several years â€" and the extremely polished result those efforts have yielded â€" I'm surprised Google continues to throw any energy into promoting the Plus management option to small businesses, let alone developing and maintaining it.

Any business owner who visits Plus should be sent right over to the Places for Business Dashboard. It seems to be much more empathetic to the typical business owner's level of sophistication, and solves their most important needs more directly than Plus.

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For Conspicuous Gallantry

Featured

For Conspicuous Gallantry

Yesterday, President Obama presented Army Staff Sergeant Ty M. Carter with the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry. Carter was one of 53 American soldiers who woke up the morning of October 9, 2009 to an attack by more than 300 Taliban fighters.

President Barack Obama applauds Staff Sergeant Ty M. Carter, U.S. Army, after presenting him with the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Aug. 26, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Everything you need to know to create a successful news section

Posted: 21 Aug 2013 01:38 AM PDT

Along with blogging, a well-run news section is a great way of ensuring that a steady stream of new content is added to your website, bringing additional traffic to your site and giving the search engines plenty to crawl. It also shows you to be a source of relevant knowledge, demonstrating your expertise and interest in the area, making it a great way to enhance your brand. The principle is similar to retailers who produce their own free magazines (such as Sainsbury's, Tesco and Boots) – it's adding value to their customers, while subtly promoting them as a business.

To clarify, what I'm talking about is a section of your site dedicated to reporting on news stories that are relevant to your industry, as distinct from a section for storing your company press releases (though obviously it's still good to have a separate page for these, to give journalists a helping hand).

For example, a travel site could have a "Travel News" section that would keep readers informed of things like forthcoming strike action and other things that might affect their travel plans, recent research on travel topics, changes in travel regulations, and so on. It could also report on things that may help encourage bookings, such as the Northern Lights being particularly strong this December.

Some examples of good news sections

In my last post I talked about Skyscanner's Travel News and Features section as a great example of an engaging news section, with an entertaining mix of travel advice and topical news stories, with the example below being one of their recent stories.

Looking at other sectors, here are some other good examples of the kind of content I'm talking about:

Harvey Nichols: HN Edit (fashion, beauty and food news)
Knowthenet: Internet Safety & Security News
Ecole Chocolat: Chocolate News
Gramophone: Classical Music News
Stork Butter: Baking News (see what they did there?)

Blog, news section or both?

A news section is a bit different from a blog, so if you wanted, you could have both without having any overlap of content. While a blog allows a greater degree of informality and a far wider variety of topics and formats, a news section should be more formal and impartial, with no room for the personal opinion of the writer.

Like a blog, adding a news section to your site provides fresh new content on a regular basis, and can be used to report on recent news for your industry, thereby capitalising on traffic for relevant ‘hot topics’. You might even be able to get your news stories featured in Google News, giving you an extra source of traffic.

Sources for news stories

To start with, where are good places to look for breaking news and other hot topics? Here are some suggestions.

Watch the news! Or listen to it on the radio. You never know when something relevant to your business will crop up.
Bookmark news sources and check them regularly for new stories; for instance, if you're a travel site, simply bookmark pages such as the Telegraph, Guardian and Times Travel sections.
Set up Google Alerts for topics relevant to your industry.
Conduct your own survey or research and publish the results.
Include a form on your news page that allows readers to submit news stories for consideration.
Monitor press releases of companies and organisations relevant to your industry for any new and interesting stories and research results.

If you have any you think should be on this list, let me know and I'll update this post.

Here's a summary of what you should and shouldn't do with your news section.

Cite your sources.
Only use sources you know you can trust, and ideally have a back-up source as well.
If you can, include a quotation from someone involved in the story, such as a witness. This could even be just a tweet from someone. This helps bring your news story to life.
Proofread and, if necessary, sub-edit your news stories to ensure a uniform style across your stories and high standards of English.
Get your story up on your website as quickly as possible – this will increase your likelihood of being linked to.
Promote each news story on Facebook and Twitter with a compelling headline and a link to the story on your site.
Optimise your headlines and title tags using likely search terms.
Make it easy for people to share by adding social sharing buttons at the top of each article.
Submit your news section to Google News – more on this below.

DON'T

Post anything you can't verify as having actually happened.
Post anything defamatory.
Use stock photos – these may make readers less trusting of what you say.
Copy other people's content – make the effort to tell a story in your own words.

Submitting your site to Google News

If you do your news section well, you may be eligible to be featured in Google's News results. It goes without saying that you can't just submit any old site to Google News – Google wouldn't be Google if it didn't make things tricky for us, after all! Google offers some guidelines on the standards it expects from sites, with regard to quality and also the technical aspects that make your news stories easier for Google's algorithm to crawl successfully. These guidelines are summarised below for ease of reference:

General

You should offer "timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience". Content such as how-to articles, advice columns or things like weather forecasts and stock market data are generally discounted.
You should adhere to journalistic values – your content should be original and honest.
Aggregated content should be separated using robots.txt, as only your own original work can be included.
You should demonstrate authority and expertise.
You should include information about yourself, which should be clearly accessible, including things like author bio, email address and phone number.
You should ensure good user experience with high standards of English and minimal adverts and auto-playing videos.

Technical

You should use unique, permanent URLs with at least three digits
When linking to other pages, you should use "at least a few words" in your anchor text. Note that Google won't be able to see links if they're in JavaScript, graphic or in a frame.
Your articles should be formatted in HTML, not PDF or any other format.
Make sure you're not blocking your news section with Robots.txt or metatags.
Google can't index audio files or multimedia content, but they can crawl "supplementary text" and some YouTube videos. That means that if you're going to include an audio clip in your article, you'll need to include a transcript along with it.
You should ideally submit a Google News sitemap via Webmaster Tools.

Quality

Your content should comply with Google's usual webmaster quality guidelines – that means not trying to manipulate Google in any way.
You should only write about actual news, so your content can't be commercial. That also means no paid advertorials. If you do have this sort of content, separate it from your main news section.
Your site should be user friendly, with rapid page load speed, minimal redirects and so on.
You should ensure that if you do use Google's own meta tags, such as the news_keywords metatag, you should not abuse them by including irrelevant terms to try and rank for those terms.

As you can see from the guidelines above, the Google News section isn't suitable for all sites. The guidelines are also a reminder to maintain journalistic integrity and not to use your news section as a further promotional opportunity for your own products or services.

This is the link you need when you're ready to submit your site.

What to do when a story evolves

One final tip: if you're covering a story that's rapidly evolving, keep updating the story on the same URL, rather than creating a new URL/story for each update to the situation. That way, you'll gain SEO benefit from incoming links to a single strong page, rather than spreading links across several stories.

Hopefully these tips will have inspired you to create an interesting news section on your own site. If you need any further help or advice, do drop me a line.

Seth's Blog : Part of a community...

Part of a community...

or apart from a community?

We can choose to "give back," or we can choose to give.

Viewing the web as a platform for generosity is very different than seeing an opportunity to turn it into an ATM machine. The way we spend our time online determines not only whether or not the community we choose grows and thrives, but it decides whether or not we will be part of what is built.

"What can I contribute today," might be the very best way to become part of a community. Relentless generosity brings us closer together.

The alternative? The masses of web surfers spending their time wasting their time, taking, clicking, scamming or being scammed.

When you think of the real communities you belong to, your family, your best friends, the tribes that matter... of course the decision is easy. We don't try to earn a little extra money when we split the bill at dinner or calculate market rate interest on a loan to a dear friend. And yet, when we get online, it's easy to start rationalizing our way to short-term behavior and selfishness.

Take or give?

• Email to a friend •

marți, 27 august 2013

Comparing the Google+ and Google Places Page Management Interfaces

Comparing the Google+ and Google Places Page Management Interfaces