Top 3 Online Shopping / Internet Marketing Trends of 2015 Mobile Web Design and site optimization There are two reasons that businesses should care about the online marketing and small business website. One, Google cares. Google will be giving sites that are optimized for mobile devices and smartphones. Most importantly, your customers are using mobile 80%+ of the time to make buying and purchase decisions. This includes local searches as well as traditional products marketed online. IS YOUR SITE OPTIMIZED TOOL: Many know 80%+ buy online now. Did you know that studies show 20% of shoppers who visit the store will still buy online. Meaning if they plan on buying and they can not use or find your website on their mobile website, you have probably lost the sale. This is the type of online experience that makes the average person say, including your customers, I will never do that again. Wouldn't it be better if they thought, "I can go to the store and look at it, I can buy it online if I want time to think about it, and it is easy either way". By the way, people tell their friends both on and offline. Facebook and other social media is the new word of mouth. Word of mouth marketing being the best marketing money could never buy. Truly well coded optimized sites If you are not technical that is ok. This simply means that in the past Google, and the other major search engines, did not pay much attention to how well you site was coded. Your sites inner workings, if you will. If it was coded less than perfect, maybe loaded a bit slow, etc, it was not a major factor. Of course users cared. We have all been on that site that just takes foreve to load. Not your site of course. CHECK YOUR SITES SPEED HERE: Now google cares too. This is usually a simple fix; or at least the fastest cheapest fix a small business owner can make. There are many details to optimizing a site and code. Ask your webmaster about how your site looks in webmaster tools. If they have no idea what you are talking about, find one that does. It is 2015 and your web designer forgot to change the calendar a couple years ago. Adding an SSL certificate is also part of optimizing your site. Have you ever noticed sites starting with https:// instead of http://. Once again your webmaster should be able to assist. The last part of optimization is schema. This is a fancy way of putting information on the site to let google know about certain types of information. A common example is your companies contact information. You can tell google my Davenport phone number is .... My address is ... in the Quad Cities. Once again any good web designer should be able to assist. HERE IS A LINK W/ More Info also: SOCIAL This is really nothing new. Even though many Quad City small businesses have not used social media as much as larger top cities or corporate sites, it is going to be something needed for most online organizations. The main issue is the time it takes to create and post to all these social accounts. And if you run a business, say in Moline 10 hours a day. Do you feel like blogging about it for a few hours more? Not likely. Fortunately it does not really need to work that way. I will try to compile a quick shortcuts guide to being social without spending much more than an hour a week shortly. If you have any questions please contact us. We can help with any of the issues mentioned above and much more.