UpBuild

Values-Driven Technical Marketing

Ruth Burr Reedy

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

MozCon 2017: Collected Live Tweets

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Last week, I attended MozCon in Seattle. As usual, I live-tweeted the heck out of it! For those of you who weren’t able to attend, or who want a wrap-up to refer back to, I’ve collected my live tweets of each session below, along with my main takeaways from each talk, and a link to the talk’s slides where I could find them. Enjoy!

Day One

Rand Fishkin, “Inside Google’s Numbers in 2017”

Rand started out the conference with a by-the-numbers overview of Google’s current search growth and market share. Google is still the biggest referrer of traffic on the web, sending TEN TIMES more traffic than the next biggest referrer (Facebook).

Lisa Myers, “How to Get Big Links”

Lisa’s approach to link building outreach and content creation is so refreshing. She’s been able to get big results by letting her team be creative and try bold things, knowing that there will be failures. I loved her idea to find existing data sets and leverage them to create new, beautiful content pieces. I think the most important takeaway from her talk is that content marketers/link builders are individuals, and you get way more success by letting them approach things their unique way rather than locking them into a rigid process.

Oli Gardner, “Data Driven Design”

Oli’s talk contained one of the statistics that stuck in my mind the most from MozCon: 51% of marketers he surveyed said their analytics was set up wrong. I know that’s a huge problem we help clients combat at UpBuild; it’s really challenging to make sure you’re tracking everything you need to track, in a way that gives you confidence that the numbers are accurate. Once you have that in place, you can use your data to gain new empathy for your users, understanding why they behave in the ways that they do, and designing solutions to better serve their needs. [Read more…] about MozCon 2017: Collected Live Tweets

Why Image Resizing is Important

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When optimizing websites for faster page load time, one of the most common errors we see is that images aren’t the proper size, requiring the browser to resize the image every time the page loads. Since images can often make up the bulk of the bytes needed to load a web page, everything we can do to make our images smaller and easier to load will pay dividends in increased site speed. [Read more…] about Why Image Resizing is Important