The “picture is worth a thousand words” often seems to be taken a little too literally.

Take the main page of the Nuance UK website:

The image is striking, but conveys nothing. And the text overlay does little by the way of clarification.

A click on the Learn More About Nuance button takes me to the following page:

Another person with their head thrown back, but I’m still no clearer, so I click on the Learn More button again:

The images on these pages serve no purpose, aside from adding some colour.

Images employed on your website need to either convey relevant information or entice your visitors to act.

By way of example, Amazon’s own graphics and visuals are almost non-existent. The visitor is instead bombarded by images of the products that they sell, and nothing more.

Research demonstrates that our eyes are initially drawn to the images on a web page. So why not go for something more productive than eye candy?

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Automation is a wonderful thing. I use Macro Scheduler to automate a large number of tasks every day, and it probably saves me in the region of 3-4 hours a week, sometimes more.

But not everything should be automated.

I find it unnerving that planes can take off and land automatically, but take some comfort in the fact that a (hopefully stable) computer might do a better job than a person. At least that’s what I tell myself, when sitting inside the many tons of metal that are hurtling themselves towards the ground at terrifying speed.

I’m also baffled by companies who choose to trust Google’s automated settings to handle their AdWords accounts.

Automation is easier, but before flipping the switch, think about what you might be doing.

Google make money from AdWords. They make money from you by how you set up your account.

Do you really want Google to decide how the account should be run?

Do you want Google to decide how much you should pay for a click, or how much you should spend a day?

There are many settings within an AdWords account. Yet none of the defaults are in the interests of the advertiser. Not one.

Google’s system is setup primarily for Google.

The Inside AdWords blog recently announced that Google have raised the number of automated rules from 10 to 100.

Don’t be tempted. Don’t consider automation.

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Effective AdWords Management is an increasingly elusive beast, but mastering the basics of AdWords really isn’t difficult.

So why do so many companies make the same mistakes time and time again?

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Search engine optimisation (or optimization if you insist) is the process of making sure that the search engines recognise, qualify and index the content of your website.

I recently attended a presentation on black hat SEO that I found interesting. The speaker clearly knew a lot about the darker side of SEO, but his polarised views were more than little disconcerting.

For example he considered so-called White hat SEOs to be “losers”, and frequently referred to Matt Cutts of Google disparagingly and with a surprising level of venom.

SEO is about helping the search engines understand the visitors that you want on your website.

Like any business relationship this can be anywhere on a scale from absolute honesty to complete deception. But no-one can dispute that black hat techniques carry a degree of risk.

A black hat SEO may argue that the rewards outweigh the risks, but if you’re contemplating following the dark side, you might want to think about what you’ll be gambling.

If SEO is about making sure the engines index your content, there should be no room for techniques that jeopardise that aim.

The dark side might be tempting, but the good guys usually win.

Note: The next issue of our Competitive Edge newsletter will be covering this issue and some of the finer details of practical and safe search engine optimisation.

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Self-belief and confidence can play an important part in success, but it’s easy to go too far.

Take the following comments in a well-known forum:

“I tried X, it didn’t work, therefore X is pointless.”

An open mind and a hunger for experimentation can be more profitable than past experience.

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Google are reporting more than 62 million Google+ users. Impressive, especially when compared to the 10 million users reported in July.

While not even close to the 800 million Facebook users, I suspect we’ll see serious growth and a closing of the gap over the next year.

Paul Allen thinks there may be 400 million Google+ users by the end of 2012, but a lot can happen in twelve months.

I believe that the growth of Google+ will be largely determined by the actions of Facebook.

If Facebook do nothing by the way of change or burn a few more privacy/usability bridges, Google+ will prosper.

When a competing product offers similar benefits, a little dissatisfaction may be all that’s needed to make the leap.

It’s a precarious position for Facebook, and a volatile one for Google.

Roll on 2012.

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The problem with new is that users don’t like to learn. Unless there’s something in it for them.

New for the sake of new usually just means difficult.

If you’re big enough to force your users to adapt to your new interface, they may grumble, but they won’t really have a choice. Think Microsoft’s Ribbon toolbar and Gmail’s new interface.

If you’re prepared to be niche enough that your different approach will attract a new type of user, then your innovation may offer a genuinely unique selling point for a small number of users. Think Ommwriter. Exactly.

If you’re not big enough to force your users and want to fill more than the smallest niche, then new may be risky. Unless your new approach is easy to learn and actually useful. Think Trello.

Bucking the trend may sound cool at conferences and networking events, but there’s usually more of a case to be made for improving norms and conventions.

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How do you choose your toilet paper?

Your first thought might be that price is the dominant factor, but you’ll almost certainly take into account the texture/comfort factor as well. None of us want to use the low-grade sandpaper that we saw in our schools, for example. A few extra pence can make for a far more comfortable experience.

I assume that the manufacturers have an uphill battle to separate themselves from their competition for two reasons.

The first is familiarity. There’s a good chance that the next time you buy toilet paper you’ll simply buy the same brand as last time. Which is why here in the UK so many of the options on offer use a similar blue or lilac colour scheme. Blue looks clean, and lilac looks… purple. But I myself have on occasion bought the wrong brand, which is one of the many reasons that I usually leave such matters to my wife.

The second reason is that it’s very hard to create a competitive advantage. Too cheap implies a painful user experience, so how do you differentiate what you have, when the product only performs one very basic and ultimately unpleasant task?

One way might be to lean towards the absurd:

Do this company really believe that your toilet experience will be any more luxurious by what the toilet paper is enriched with?

Or could this even be a little tongue in cheek (pun intended) humour?

Aside from the absurdity, I’m absolutely amazed by their choice of colour scheme.

Differentiation is important in a crowded market, which is why I’m surprised that there are no major “eco friendly” toilet papers on the shelves of our supermarket.

Surely a paper designed to biodegrade far quicker than any of the competition would have a competitive advantage that might actually persuade their loyal customers to switch?

If customers are merely loyal out of habit and convenience, the market is usually ripe for innovation.

Stupidity probably won’t make a dent.

Note: I was overwhelmed by compelling ideas when choosing the title for this blog post. Please feel free to add suggestions to the comments below. Crudity and vulgarity are very much expected.

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We live in an age of crap service. We don’t like it, but we accept it. Sometimes we even expect it.

A few weeks ago I had the dubious pleasure of staying in one of Hilton’s London hotels, for the European Software Conference.

The conference was great.

The hotel set a new benchmark in appalling.

The hotel seemed to think that this was good enough to serve for breakfast – scrambled eggs by the way, although I’m not sure what they’ve been scrambled with:

When we requested an extra bed for our little girl, they seemed to think that this was reasonable – a total of three slats missing; impossible to sleep on:

Needless to say I won’t be staying at that particular hotel again. Ever.

Many small businesses pride themselves on good service. And most if not all customers appreciate good service when they receive it.

Oddly enough, bad service has also never been so dangerous.

In the past, the only option for someone unhappy with their hotel would be to vent at the staff on the front desk.

Today the same person can share their experiences with the world.

Hello world.

In the not-too-distant past, good service was taken for granted. Today it’s a rare commodity and a competitive advantage.

If you have it, flaunt it. Make sure visitors to your website know how good your customers think you are.

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Last month Google announced dramatic changes that seem to have fallen below the radar for many businesses.

In a nutshell, they will no longer be reporting on the organic keywords used by anyone logged into their Google accounts.

So if, for example, you are logged into your Gmail account, carry out a search on Google and click one of the organic results, the keyword you searched for will not be reported in the website’s Analytics account. It will simply be classed as (not provided).

As Google put it:

“We hope that today’s move to increase the privacy and security of your web searches is only the next step in a broader industry effort to employ SSL encryption more widely and effectively.”

This raises a number of questions.

1 – Why does this only apply to organic search results? If Google are genuinely taking a stance on protecting privacy, why not apply the same rule to Google AdWords?

The cynic might assume that Google can’t afford to upset their paying advertisers, but have no qualms about doing so to their free Analytics users.

I might class myself as a cynic.

2 – This all stems from Google’s recent move to force logged-in users to the secure version of Google. So why not force all Google users to their secure server? SSL became the default setting in Gmail almost two years ago.

3 – The big question:  How big a problem is this?

The scale of the problem will depend on the people you’re trying to target. We’ve been looking at some of our client’s Analytics accounts, and have seen that the number of affected organic searches seem to average around 10-12%. Sometimes considerably higher.

The above screenshot shows a sample of data from our blog. Over 16% of the organic keywords used to find our content are not being reported.

If we’re lucky, the 16% will consist of a representative sample across the board.

If we’re unlucky, it might contain some incredibly useful data that is now beyond our reach.

By taking away such a large sample, our data has to all intents and purposes been polluted.

To see how much of your data you’re losing right now, go into your Analytics account and choose TRAFFIC SOURCES, Sources, Search, Organic.

You will then probably see (not provided) in the top ten keywords.

If not, you can count yourself lucky – for now at least.

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