UpBuild

Values-Driven Technical Marketing

Ruth Burr Reedy

Why We Don’t Do Performance-Based Compensation

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Since most of our engagements are pretty heavily tailored to our clients’ needs, we don’t really have a “standard engagement” at UpBuild; while there may be similarities, each of our proposals is unique. There are a ton of things we can do for our clients; there are also a few things we absolutely won’t do.

Of the items on our “Non-Negotiables” page, the one I’ve heard the most prospective clients push back or express surprise about is our policy against entering into pay-per-performance contracts for any reason. In the spirit of Transparency (one of our dearly-held company values), let’s talk a little bit about why we don’t do that. [Read more…] about Why We Don’t Do Performance-Based Compensation

Page Speed Metrics Beyond Page Load Time

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Page speed is one of the most important metrics in technical SEO today. Users expect a page to load fast, and are quick to abandon pages that take too long to load; in fact, a study for one online retailer found that just a 1-second increase in page load time resulted in a 56% increase in bounce rate.

Since page speed is such an important user experience factor, Google has been using it as a ranking factor in desktop search since 2010. Recently, Google announced that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor in mobile search as well; this is particularly important in light of Google’s move to mobile-first indexing.
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AMP for 2018

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Featured image photo credit: https://musicoomph.com

As we move into 2018, we get a lot of questions about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Is this something our clients need to be implementing? What are the pros and cons of doing so? Will it be worth the effort to do well?

Tyler wrote a great primer on AMP a while back, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but put simply, AMP pages use a combination of stripped-down HTML, streamlined CSS, and AMP-specific HTML tags to create faster-loading versions of pages for mobile devices. For more on AMP for Google Search, read Google’s AMP developer guide.
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Filed Under: SEO

UpBuild Team Day Fall 2017: Plans and Pumpkins

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A couple of weeks ago, UpBuild had our second Team Day of 2017, and if you ask me, it was the best Team Day we’ve had so far.

What is Team Day?

Since we’re a fully remote team, we make sure to take time twice a year to get everyone in a room. It’s a good opportunity to get to know each other better, share some information about how the company is doing, and plan for the next six months. (Mike talked more about why Team Days are so important to us in his post about the first-ever Team Day).

The UpBuild team at Team Day Fall 2017.

Look at these awesome nerds.

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What “Data Should Tell a Story” Really Means

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Working in marketing, you’ve probably heard that “data should tell a story.” It sounds like a hacky business cliche, but thinking about data in terms of storytelling can help you be a lot more effective in creating and delivering reports, dashboards and other data-driven recommendations to your clients and stakeholders.

Simply put, “data should tell a story” means that you should never be reporting on information without having a clear idea of what it means, the context in which it should be interpreted, and the actions you’d expect to be taken as a result. Anyone can pull a report – the real value is in using that report to effect positive change. [Read more…] about What “Data Should Tell a Story” Really Means