It takes more than a lot of "hits"

Do you review your website stats? You should have access to data that shows various activity on your website. These statistics should be available in the backend of your site or accessed on the hosting server.

What I hear often is comments from a site owner or business owner about how many hits they are getting. The total number is nice but there are more important figures to concern yourself with. For example, it is really the amount of unique visitors that counts. Each unique visitor is an individual that came to your site. How many pages they clicked through will determine the number of hits.

With most systems you can see the average number of pages visited by each individual but here are the two most important figures to concern yourself with in my opinion.

First, you should be able to find out what pages were most visited. This information will tell you what pages are getting the most attention and you can determine if that is where you want your visitors to focus their attention.

Second, how much time did visitors spend looking at the pages on your site. See what the percentages are for the amount of time spent looking at your site. Hopefully your stats can show that. You might see that visitors are on your site for less than 30 seconds, 30 seconds to 2 minutes, 2 to 5 minutes, 5 to 15 minutes, 15 to 30 minutes or even more. If your site is what they are really looking for and you have quality content you can expect your visitors to spend 2 to 5 minutes reading and looking around. 2 to 5 minutes is an ideal amount of time for them to get interested and make a call-to-action right away (either contact you or make a purchase). If they spend too much time they may be comparing with other sites or stepped away, hopefully they bookmarked you. If site visitors spend very little time on your site you have some questions to think about. Is there enough content or is the site designed properly? By design I mean not just the aesthetics and layout but how information is organized and presented. Another big question is whether your SEO (search engine marketing) and on-site optimization are mis-leading? Are you driving the wrong visitors to your site?

Website statistics are also important to evaluate how effective your sales and marketing promotions are. You should be able to access a variety of other reports, such as: which search engines are generating the most traffic for your site, which keywords are resulting in the greatest number of hits and where most of your hits are coming from. Without usage data like this, you'll have a difficult time making informed decisions about the effectiveness of your website and marketing.


Freddy Uson is the Creative Director and owner of Uson Consulting, llc. Visit usonconsulting.com A Web Design & Creative Marketing business that offers web design, development, e-commerce, SEO and site optimization, marketing and all print collateral. Based in the Central New Jersey, Princeton, NJ area and serving all of NY/NJ. Contact us at (551) 265-8762 or email info@usonconsulting.com

A smart tool to save time and may create more sales

Doctors, dentists, massage therapists, optometrists, spas, accountants, lawyers and service professionals such as electricians and plumbers all have something in common… they all rely on appointments! Appointments are an important part of their business and many of them use old-fashioned paper appointment books or calendar pads. The list of different businesses that rely on appointments is vast.

A better approach is for a business owner or office manager to be able to accept and set appointment requests online. It is easy reply to customers and takes advantage of future marketing opportunities.

Uson Consulting now offers a brand-new Calendar Manager. Owners, managers and employees can set up client appointments, custom events, and sales activity. Calendars can be viewed in monthly, weekly or daily formats based on preference. A widget allowing the user to select a preferred view can be added to any page on a Web site.

You can maintain private calendars for internal use only and manage employee profiles, set up tasks for individual workers and manage time off and vacation time. The Calendar Manager is an ideal solution for a prospect looking to manage time, employees and other resources efficiently in today’s challenging economic environment.

Fewer people are using voice telephone calls to manage their daily lives, because of the speed and convenience of the Internet and smartphones. Younger generations are expected to use voice telephone calls even less. A business could even use its Web site or mobile site to offer a coupon or discount if a customer makes an appointment within a certain time period. A customer or client would expect an email to confirm the appointment. In that email you could attach documents they need to read or fill out and bring with them or you can have a form built directly into the email. We can help you create different email templates that target the specific responses desired. The confirming email could provide information the client needs before an appointment or you could talk about a product/service related to the initial appointment request. This gets them thinking about other services/products you provide to create interest or get them to gather questions.


Freddy Uson is the Creative Director and owner of Uson Consulting, llc. Visit usonconsulting.com A Web Design & Creative Marketing business that offers web design, development, e-commerce, SEO and site optimization, marketing and all print collateral. Based in the Central New Jersey, Princeton, NJ area and serving all of NY/NJ. Contact us at (551) 265-8762 or email info@usonconsulting.com

Online presence too expensive?

As a medical professional you may be familiar with the various web development companies who specialize in offering online solutions to your industry. Many of these industry specific web solution companies typically offer expensive web sites that come with either phone or online support. The support is usually part of an annual contract or an initial 6-month period and adds to the overall expenses.

Are you satisfied with the support you are getting?
Is the support solely technical?
Do you get recommendations with your marketing goals in mind?
How do you manage your online content and update it?
Does your solution offer affordable yet comprehensive OFF-SITE SEO?
Do you maintain and manage contacts (patients, vendors, colleagues, etc) and communicate regularly with email campaigns?


We are expanding our creative and marketing efforts by reaching out to medical practices, surgical centers, outpatient facilities and radiology centers. We have a few clients from the medical industry and feel we can compete with the companies who target only medical professionals.

Uson Consulting, llc. can create a custom design web solution for your business and offers a cost effective expert support system that is truly unique. We work with your staff to develop optimized content and bring our diverse experience to help promote and market you and your brand. In addition, our web solutions come with unlimited toll-free 24/7 Expert Customer Support. You can always access a site editing expert, a SEO expert (search engine optimization), an email campaigns expert, a site promotion expert, an e-commerce expert or a database expert.
Our cost-effective CUSTOM DESIGNED web site solutions come complete with:


• CMS (customer management system with unlimited 24/7 expert support)
• CRM (contact management, email campaigns)
• Mobile friendly and responsive to smartphones
• Integrated maps and driving directions
• Social networking widgets and blog integration
• Virtual & downloadable products (MP3s, eBooks, PDFs)
• Pages optimized and search engine friendly

And much more!


Contact us to set-up a free online "live" presentation so you can see how we compare to the industry-specific companies. Our presentation will show you how comprehensive and cost-effective our solution is.

Freddy Uson is the Creative Director and owner of Uson Consulting, llc. Visit usonconsulting.com A Web Design & Creative Marketing business that offers web design, development, e-commerce, SEO and site optimization, marketing and all print collateral. Based in the Central New Jersey, Princeton, NJ area and serving all of NY/NJ. Contact us at (551) 265-8762 or email info@usonconsulting.com

E-commerce can learn a thing or two from print catalogs

According to a recent report by comScore, desktop-based e-commerce sales were up 13 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2013. The study found that e-commerce sales have seen double-digit growth for 10 consecutive quarters.

As more E-commerce web sites pop up I believe that competition to grab those sales will become more difficult with time. E-commerce web sites remind me of printed catalogs we received in the mail, which was incredibly popular in the decades leading up to the turn of the century. In the past, I was an Art Director who specialized in print catalog design and layout. I worked for the largest catalog agency at the time, as well as in-house for some large catalog merchandisers. There were some very specific things that separated the larger successful catalogs from the smaller less successful catalogs. I believe the same things will separate E-commerce web sites into the two categories as well.

I am referring to great design and photography. The more successful catalogs and E-commerce web sites have well-designed layouts with quality photography to match. Too many E-commerce sites today unfortunately have no branding carried through the page design, poor layout design and the product photography looks like it was taken with a smartphone camera.

Photography is extremely important when creating an E-commerce website. Just like a printed catalog, a website is a non-tactile experience for the visitor since they do not have the ability to feel or sense a product with touch, smell, taste, etc. You must present products in an attractive manner with lighting, composition, styling, propping and more, all captured by a professional photographer.

It is even better if the photographer is collaborating with an Art Director or Designer so the images work with the aesthetics and brand that surround the products on the pages. Good design will extend into an easy shopping experience. The shopping cart should be simple with a layout and interface that are easy to use. The ability to cross-reference similar products or bundle items into groups for promotions and discounts will help keep a site visitor shopping on your website and increase the average spent. Good design will enhance and tell a story (brand image) for the business as well as the products.

These two attributes (design and photography by talented professionals) are crucial to making an E-commerce web site stand out and be impactful to encourage sales. Many web sites are missing the two elements that drive branding and help tell stories to the viewers. Unfortunately, there is a flood of cookie-cutter, template based, do-it-yourself, monotone, boring web sites created by individuals who are not qualified. All this is similar to the period of time when desktop publishing became widely available to the masses. Suddenly, Graphic Designers were getting less work and less pay while unqualified individuals handled design and production in-house for many businesses. That turned around as smart businesses started to see the degradation and in-effective print collateral being passed around. In time the same thing will happen with web sites and especially E-commerce sites. Be ahead of the curve and put creative talent to work so you can gain more from your online offerings.


Freddy Uson is the Creative Director and owner of Uson Consulting, llc. Visit usonconsulting.com A Web Design & Creative Marketing business that offers web design, development, e-commerce, SEO and site optimization, marketing and all print collateral. Based in the Central New Jersey, Princeton, NJ area and serving all of NY/NJ. Contact us at (551) 265-8762 or email info@usonconsulting.com

An easier, faster process for our clients

Uson Consulting recently launched new tools to save time and make the work process more efficient.

One challenge has always been collecting content (images, videos, .docx files and more) from clients at the beginning of a new or redesign web site project. Content would be delivered to us with multiple emails, mailed or hand delivered media and pulled from servers.

We now provide clients our Content & Organization Tool. This online tool makes it easier to provide us all content clients wish to include in their projects.

It helps us reduce the overall time frame and deliver completed work faster.

If there is a large amount of files, we provide a password-protected cloud folder to upload batches quickly. There is also a separate spreadsheet for providing us with E-commerce product information and content.

Obtaining a new custom designed web site or updating an existing web site should be an easy, seemless process. Uson Consulting is always striving to improve systems and tools to increase client satisfaction.


Freddy Uson is the Creative Director and owner of Uson Consulting, llc. Visit usonconsulting.com A Web Design & Creative Marketing business that offers web design, development, e-commerce, SEO and site optimization, marketing and all print collateral. Based in the Central New Jersey, Princeton, NJ area and serving all of NY/NJ. Contact us at (551) 265-8762 or email info@usonconsulting.com

Simple answer to getting more business…

Is your web site responsive? The answer should be yes. I'll post some interesting statistics to back this up below.

When a web site is responsive it can present itself in an appropriate version for the device it is viewed on. Most web sites are designed to be viewed on standard browsers for a laptop computer or desktop system. However, that web site can also be viewed with browsers on the tiny screens of smartphones and tablets. The issue is that the site is so small it becomes difficult to navigate and read. You can enlarge areas of the site to view but that requires scrolling around in all directions to view content. This is an annoying experience for the site visitor and that will encourage them to move on to another web site.

The solution is to create mobile-friendly versions of your web site that will display properly on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Being responsive means it will know what device you're using and display the site properly. Mobile sites are typically edited to provide only the most important pages and content with very easy-to-use navigation. Speed is very important to mobile device users so you want them to access what they need using a simplified version of the web site. Certain elements and graphics are too distracting and fill the screen or take away from displaying your content. You want to emphasize pages that work in conjuction with your social media efforts or are landing pages from marketing collateral.


Here are the numbers you cannot ignore...

54% of people who use their smartphones in the store are looking up other local stores’ pricing, while 53% are looking for online pricing. (Source: Wave Collapse, 2012)

44% of advanced device owners are looking for coupon opportunities on the devices and 17% have already purchased a product via mobile platforms (Source: GfK, 2012)

50% of smartphone shoppers use a GPS/mapping app to find a retail location; 44% access the site of a retailer where they typically shop; 34% downloaded a retailer’s app; and an equal number (24%) search for a coupon to use at checkout or use a barcode-scanning app to comparison shop (Source: Nielsen, 2012)

4 out of 5 consumers use smartphones to shop. (Source: comScore, 2012)


If your web site is responsive you have the opportunity to capture a very large growing group of consumers. If you would like to know more about what is available and how you can offer all those consumers a responsive web site please contact us.


Freddy Uson is the Creative Director and owner of Uson Consulting, llc. Visit usonconsulting.com A Web Design & Creative Marketing business that offers web design, development, e-commerce, SEO and site optimization, marketing and all print collateral. Based in the Central New Jersey, Princeton, NJ area and serving all of NY/NJ. Contact us at (551) 265-8762 or email info@usonconsulting.com

SEO — on-page or off-page?

Do you know the difference between On-page and Off-page Optimization?

On-page optimization involves manipulating code and content on each page of a website to get better search results on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. The elements that can be manipulated during on-page optimization include the actual HTML code, meta tags, keyword placement and keyword density.

By contrast, off-page optimization is not in the code on the pages of the website. Off-page optimization has an effect on a web page’s ranking on search engines with link popularity. Content is optimized in social media, blogs, articles and other websites which all point back to your site.

Off-site optimization is more costly (and more effective) because it is an on-going monthly campaign. Content is optimized and resides in many areas online other than your website. All of it should relate to your website, business or whatever you are trying to promote. The power of this optimization is that a much larger audience can access content that links back to you.


Freddy Uson is the Creative Director and owner of Uson Consulting, llc. Visit usonconsulting.com A Web Design & Creative Marketing business who offers web design, development, e-commerce, SEO and site optimization, marketing and all print collateral. Based in the Central New Jersey, Princeton, NJ area and serving all of NY/NJ. Contact us at (551) 265-8762 or email info@usonconsulting.com