Recession - Killing Me Softly

Published on March 11th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

If the recession isn’t doing enough to kill your business, here’s our top list for self-inflicted wounds you can use to drive your website into the ground.

1 - Ignore Other Opportunities

You can appear on Google Map listings. In Image search. In Video search. On YouTube. Blog searches. Mobile search. News sites. News aggregation sites. Bookmarking sites. Press Releases. Social networking (FaceBook, My Space, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc all have their markets and uses). Human moderated directories. Professional and trade association directories and many, many other places.

(We come across companies with an obsession to show in precisely one place - usually Google organic search results. There’s a risk to that. If Google change their ranking algorithms, all the traffic can disappear; spread your risks by appearing in all the places you *should* be. They don’t usually have the volume of traffic you can find on Google, but some have high quality visitors, even if of low volume, and some have really high volumes of variable quality - if you don’t consciously consider these, your competitors will have no competition. )

2 - Redirect Everything, All The Time

Sick of those boring old URLs that everyone else uses? Evade the search engine results pages by changing your mind about what the page is called. Why stick with just serving the page you were asked for - deliver an excitingly renamed page on every request!

Use a custom Web Content Management System with a unique tracking code in every page request! Or, use Microsoft’s incredible “This’ll Fool The Spiders” Cookieless Mode. Then, when a spider comes to visit, the pages that ordinary users see will be renamed dynamically. Now you can decorate your URLs with “?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1″ *AND*, in a 2 for 1 Daft Deal, insert unique strings like “(X(S1)(hjkgjhgw2823tku))” into all paths recorded by search engines. That’ll split the weight between multiple competing pages and drop your rank. Super move!

For an extra trick, change the page content after each crawl, so that spiders will take years to recrawl frequently enough to work out that the page is actually the same, whatever the wierd bit in the middle, or at the end, does.

(This seems to be a misguided attempt to help people who don’t allow cookies or to provide some other kind of session interface. However, the public part of the site doesn’t critically need cookies and tracking - so for the sake of a tiny handful of people who want stateful operation but don’t want to allow cookies, they stopped spiders from crawling efficiently, and spread pagerank to thousands of “different” pages. The new “canonical” link tag should help reduce this perverse usage, eventually.)

3 - Only Idiots Need Descriptions

Your site is famous for what you do. You don’t need no stinking meta description. Besides, people say that the meta stuff isn’t important any more. Dump those weaselly bits that say ‘name=”description” content=”some boring old rubbish”‘. It’ll make the page smaller too, so it loads faster. That *has* to be good!

Alternatively, forget boring old HTML and build a Flash Site. Sure, you need a stinky piece of HTML to *load* the Flash, but you don’t really have to do anything with it, like Titles or Descriptions. That’s *old* stuff.

(We still come across far too many sites that buzz with graphical excitement, and are either unfindable, or if you stumble on to them in search, have a dull as dishwater title and no description. It’d take 400 characters to put up a meaningful title and description that would help users to find and recognise the site as useful. And not a lot more to make Flash content into a decoration for users that want to engage with it, while the real site is delivered in search engine friendly AJAX.)

4 - Optimise *All* Pages for the Same Keyword

Well, if getting *one* page in the search engine results is great, think how much better it would be if every page in your site was showing all over the search engine results pages? Make sure that you use all the keyword optimisation tricks you can think of, to make sure every page ranks for the same keyword, including your contact page, privacy page and terms and conditions page. Everyone wants to see snippets from your privacy policy, anyway, no matter how irrelevant to the keyword.

(If you don’t optimise each page for different keywords, you confuse the search engines about which page to rank - reducing the likelihood of any page appearing at all. Don’t repeat titles and descriptions, either. Don’t link to other pages with the text “click here”, either - a nice descriptive link text helps you and users.)

5 - Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

For ease of development, and to give that creative freedom, just let anybody name any page anything! So if you sell hot water bottles, we could have pages called:

• hotwaterbottles
• hotwaterbottle
• hot_water_bottle
• hot-water-botttles
• HotWaterBottles
• Bottles/hot-water

Each page makes a slightly different claim about what you do. Each is linked to a few times. So there’s no particular page that has all the weight for your product. They are all good pages for your product. They just don’t rank very highly. But that’s OK, because they are creative.

(Creativity is great. But a creative site you can’t find and reliably navigate, is… a work of art? A lost opportunity? An investment without a return? Your choice of what you call it - but “high ranking” and “popular” shouldn’t be in your list of descriptions.)

6 - What Call To Action?

Write effusively about your company. But don’t let anyone know what the products are or what they have to do to get it. Avoid phone numbers. Don’t offer contact forms. No shopping baskets and storefronts. No email addresses. It’s a web site. They sell themselves, automatically…

(We’ve come across sites that manage to completely conceal what the product is, and have no mention of any contact information, whatsoever. Companies that say they deliver results… no idea about even what sector they work in, and no idea on the page what to do to proceed further. Tell users what you’ve got and what you want them to do; they’ll do it if they want what you’ve got.)

7 - Hide The USP

When someone buys from you, they pay slightly over the standard price… But unlike your competition, you include free delivery and on-site service for three years. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to *mention* that? Somewhere? Or are you really just going to let visitors guess that’s what you might be offering?

Start off by assuming that you’ll only be seeing your regular customers and your staff on your web site, and you could be right.

(We’ve come across sites that have great reasons to pay a little more than the lowest market price - but who seem embarrassed to admit they have a reason why their product costs more - whether that is functionality, quantity or quality. If you have a Unique Selling Point - tell the visitor what it is. Clearly. )

8 - Abandon Shop, Abandon Shop!

Your visitors have added items to the shopping basket. They click on the purchase button. They aren’t signed in!

This would be a great moment to empty the basket for them. If they are a new customer, they probably need a nice new basket, not that old, used one with stuff in it. Do them a favour and just clear it out. Now they can order with confidence …. wait… where did they go?

(Focusing on parts of the process can destroy the whole point. If you create a great login system, that’s interesting. But lose the basket, and you’ve lost, no matter how good the login system or the basket are. Even better - don’t make users remember whether they were registered before and force a password retrieval process - if they aren’t on your site every day, to buy something, they *will* forget registration details - so focus on collecting shipping details and match those to an ID, if you have to, as late in the process as you can. It is more important to get a new, satisfied customer, than the registration details of someone you’ve annoyed, who won’t buy. )

9 - Never Diminishing Circles

Special! Discount For New Customers!

In order to purchase this item, you must be signed in. Register Now!

Item Discount Only Applies To New Customers. Please select another item.

Purge cookies.

Special! Discount For New Customers!

Rinse and repeat.

(We’ve come across many variations of this. Special offers you can’t reach, technological obstacles to users completing a purchase. Test your site; monitor for small creeping changes having a huge impact. It is tedious to pretend you are a real user, and try to look at the screen as they do, instead of just *knowing* that at this screen you ignore the big graphic link that says “Buy Me” and must click the small text link in the footer, or whatever the trick is. If you want customers, you have to hit the problems and solve them, before would-be customers hit them and become dead basket cases. )

10 - Unique Navigation System

So many stores have boring links to look at, with categories of product and links to related products, etc. Let’s make an exciting visual storefront that exemplifies our brand values! We can use special parts of the screen, with unexpectedly tiny and ambiguous icons in pale grey on paler grey to act as store navigation! That’ll be exciting! New! Different! We’ll stand out from the crowd with our uniquely low conversion rate!

(Forcing users to understand new navigation systems can work - if the site is a game or a puzzle and that’s the point of the site; it might work for something like the the Wii, or PS3 sites, but mostly fails everywhere else. Non-standard navigation prevents users from understanding what they have to do to get to the right page and the right activity. Why would you *want* to turn away business for a shop, by disguising the front door as another display window or as a brick wall with a “closed” sign up and the lights off - the visual cues are important user interface design features, not a fashion statement. Usually. We did some work for a company who insisted that would be users solve a puzzle before they could register - and the registration rate declined dramatically; buying users are usually trying to solve their problems, not yours. )

11 - Make Your Business Problems A Challenge For Your Users

So you have a lot of products… Organize them on the web site, the way that your business divisions are organized! Users will naturally understand that, for example, *this* printer is managed by the “Small Office/Home Office” group and *this* very similar printer is managed by the “Small Business” team. Or, organize the user interaction by department. Have marketing offer products over here… and the basket is filled using these links over in the Sales part - and the order is submitted directly to accounts, who have their part on the site. But because each part of the site can change independently of the others, no cross linking between divisions of the company! If users want the products enough, they’ll learn what to do.

(OK, there is some value in exclusive brands, because they keep people out and that can let you drive up the price… but is displaying your lack of ability to organise a functionally effective customer oriented interface, something you really want to tell customers? Customers shouldn’t be aware, from your web interface, how complex a problem it is to manage their order - that should be your problem, not their problem. We’re perpetually astonished that so many businesses reflect their internal issues to customers, and make it harder for customers to buy, not easier. )

12 - Server Response Codes

Stand out from the crowd in search engine results! Why bother with boring messages relevant to your users, when you can show a fashionable and stylish “Planned Server Downtime” or an equally gorgeous “The Page You Were Looking For Cannot Be Found” search engine results title? Hack your web server so *all* pages are “200″ (Page OK). Then, when a search engine spider visits, it can’t tell whether the page is what visitors want, or a temporary out-of-service page.

This is one drastic technique to reduce the number of 404’s in your site reports. Get to the top of your managers’ “outstanding staff reports” by eliminating all 404’s, 301’s, 302’s and 500 series status codes in web server reports. Now you can have 100% good page delivery! Even if the page is rubbish.

(We have no real idea why the guy that did this, did it. We think he wanted to reduce 404’s, but he may just have been having a bad brain day.)

Summary

There’s lots of way to kill your business on the web. Many more than we’ve listed. How many are you using?

A recessionary environment is a good time to take a hard look at how effectively your web site is working for you. Hopefully we’ve tripped a few alarms and you can review whether you are making the most of the web marketing opportunities you have.