Tag: website marketing

Google is Crawling Towards You, Are You Ready?

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google

Have you ever searched for anything on Google? Of course, you have!

Think about how often you click on one of the first few links that are shown, see what you were looking for, and then move onto something else. Now think about how often you keep going all the way to the sixth or seventh page of search results (if you ever did) and then decide to make a purchase there.

You do NOT want your website to be on one of those high numbered pages when your potential customers are searching Google for the services that you offer!

You have spent many hours making sure that your website looks perfect, the conversion process is streamlined, and all of the information that your customers could ever want is right there waiting for them. So how do you get your awesome website onto that first page of results so that searchers will actually see it?

Become Google-Friendly!

Every website that exists is crawled by Google so that they can check out the content, the structure, and the intent. They take that information and index it so that when someone conducts a search they can offer the most relevant site. SEO ensures that your website is ready for Google to do it’s crawl so that your site will be visible when potential customers are searching. Finally letting the world see your great website and your great business.

For more information, or for help setting up your SEO, give us a call or drop us an email.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Understanding Analytics – Part 2

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exit

Ready for Part 2?

Then let’s reveal Question 2.

Our last video addressed bounce rates; what they are, and what they mean. Today, we explain how to interpret the analytics that show where visitors are exiting your site.

What does it mean when people leave your site at a certain point? How can you fix it?

Watch today’s video to learn more.

Please join us now, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you won’t miss any of our upcoming tips.

Watch our video now, or watch on YouTube.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

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Time For A Website Facelift?

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update your website

Does your website still matter?

Maybe it’s time for a facelift…

Gone are the days of publishing a website and then forgetting about it except for updates.

Your site visitors need to be engaged.

And by that, we mean that they must find the information on your site interesting enough to keep them there – and keep them coming back.

Our Marketing In A Minute video today talks about why and when you should review and update your website.

Please join us now, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you won’t miss any of our upcoming tips.

Watch our video now, or watch on YouTube.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

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What’s Your Story?

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what's your story

Well? What is your story?

Understanding what it is you are trying to communicate with your audience is a critical first step.

Today, our tip is about the importance of defining your story.

How you communicate with your community, and how clear you are within yourself, is the foundation upon which all other marketing functions will be built.  Therefore, be sure that you have absolute clarity.

Our Marketing In A Minute video series continues today. Please join us now, and consider subscribing to our channel so you won’t miss any new tips.

Watch our video now, or watch on YouTube:

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Why Your Site Needs To Be Mobile Responsive

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mobile responsive

Are you sure you are mobile responsive?

If not, you are not only on the radar for Google penalties, but are also losing potential clients.

We have shared the news about how Google penalizes non-mobile responsive sites, but beyond rankings, you could be losing business.

Today, we wanted to share with you an infographic from GoMobile Solutions that shows clearly why your site needs to be mobile.

See the infographic:

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

The Truth About Content Marketing

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content marketing strategy

Even if you are using content marketing, you might still be missing the boat!

Much has been said about the value of content marketing in recent times. And, yes, most of it is true.

Search engine optimization has always been an important component of being found online. The ability to search has morphed over the years, creating a much easier and more functional way for web visitors to search for topics and items of interest to them.

But these improvements in search ability have been created by search engines changing the way they track information on the Internet. Algorithm changes, especially with Google (who still dominates the search engine world with approximately 87% of the search market), have changed the way that SEO marketers do their business – at least in a lot of cases.

In the early days of the Internet, people were encouraged to drop tons of keywords into their website copy, even if sometimes it didn’t even make that much sense. We were also encouraged to build backlinks to tons of websites, in the hopes of building authority.

Well, while the essence of these tools still works, the practicality of putting it into practice has shifted for the better.

While it’s still important to have backlinks, it’s more important that you have quality backlinks. If you have too many backlinks to questionable sites using questionable practices, this can actually harm your placement. And while keywords are still important, it’s important that they make sense, flow properly, and are used appropriately.

So, yes, content is king!

But make sure that your content is fresh, new, and relevant to your audience. Search engines are getting smarter and smarter and will penalize you if you are plagiarizing other content. There is nothing wrong with sharing someone else’s content on your site, but ensure that you are giving attribution and are sharing the information in a proper fashion.

Gone are the days of static sites. And by that I mean those sites that were built, put onto the Internet, and never updated. Adding new, fresh content on a regular basis is your best way to improve your ranking.

But what’s even more important than your search engine ranking?

Being relevant to your audience! By providing fresh content on a regular basis to your target audience, you will gain authority, followers, and-most importantly-respect.

So write often, post regularly and give something of value to your audience and you will win the battle to stay relevant and preserve your positioning.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Avoid Google Penalties

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google penalties

Don’t get caught making these simple mistakes that could incur penalties and affect your traffic.

You don’t have to be a search engine optimization specialist to know that there have been some big changes in how Google ranks sites over the past few years.

Nearly anyone who has a website has heard of the Panda and Penguin updates Google made in the past few years.  And of course, Google continues to make changes to its algorithm to ensure it maintains its position as the top search engine. But be aware that these changes can affect how your site is seen by Google and you must do your best to stay on top of them so you don’t incur a penalty.

In the early days of search engine optimization, the “experts” would dump keywords heavily into content, often delivering something that might attract a higher ranking but certainly would not engage the reader. Another tactic was to build links with other sites that may have been low-quality links from directories and other spamming sites that few people ever really clicked on.

The changes that Google has made to their algorithms has actually resulted in better quality. These old tactics no longer work, thank goodness, and the trend has been toward content marketing. Providing people with content that is relevant and valuable to them has also proven to work well to assist with rankings.

But there are still some ways that you can inadvertently end up with penalties from Google while engaging in content marketing.

Avoid the following and your site is likely to stay safe.

1.  Lack of unique content: Another area where you can run into difficulty is by providing a lack of content that is unique. Duplicating other content in a copy and paste fashion is like playing Russian roulette and it is likely only a matter of time until your site is penalized. If you are an affiliate marketer, do your best to avoid the simple copy and paste method as well, as this will be seen as not providing value and may end up causing Google to penalize your site by lowering your ranking.  Do NOT plagerize!

2.  Over-optimizing or low quality internal content: What of the things that Google algorithms search for is the quality of your content within your website. Make sure you are providing unique, new content to your website on a regular basis and avoid rampant repetition of your content throughout your site. This not only will help you avoid incurring penalties, but also will significantly boost your organic rankings. Use different types of content as well, like podcasts, video as well as written blog posts. Google will notice and you should be rewarded.

3.  Keep current: I have often heard people say that they have finished their website. Now, I know what they mean by this, but keep in mind that your website is never finished. It should be seen as a living, breathing entity that requires some attention. Ensure that your website is kept current, removing content that is no longer valid, updating content, and making sure that all your links are working properly. If you don’t have current information on your site, not only will visitors not want to return but Google will also lose interest in your site.

The biggest penalty is to lose your ranking.  It is a difficult and never-ending job to stay on top of your optimization.  Don’t risk your reward by cutting a few corners.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

6 Steps To Improve Your Content Marketing

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content marketing

Is your content marketing working for you?

To be relevant online, it is important that you are continually providing fresh, new material. This is not only critical for search engine optimization, but also to keep the visitors to your website -your clients and prospects – engaged and interested. You have to give them a reason to keep coming back. After all, if they’ve already seen everything you have to offer, why would they come back? And, of course, if they don’t come back chances are they’re going to miss something new when you do put it out there.

But you can’t just randomly put up content. You need to be original. You need to be relevant. And, if you are sharing material that you have found in other places, you need to give attribution.

Ask the following six questions to improve the content that you are providing:

1. Do your visitors find your posts, white papers, infographics, webinars, etc. relevant and helpful?  Most people, when searching the Internet, are looking for answers to questions or problems. If you are providing something of value they are more likely to learn to trust you, to become regular visitors to your site, and eventually your client.

2. When someone lands on the blog portion of your site, what do they read first? There are lots of software solutions out there that can help you to track and identify this information. Some will give basic stats, such as the number of visitors to the site and others will provide you with live tracking of exactly where they scrolled to on the page.

3. What was it about the article noted above that first caught the visitor’s eye? Was it the title? Was it the associated image? Was it the actual material within the article? All of these are important factors that can lead to more readership and a better response to the article. Just like in print media, a headline is important to capture your audience, and images must be relevant to the material you are presenting.

4. Do you know if your visitors enjoy reading similar content from your competitors, and if so, which ones? Let’s face it, much of what is out there has been said by others in different ways. Searching cyberspace for answers is kind of like watching TV; 500 channels all showing the same or similar programming. So make sure that your content is presented in a way that attracts and retains more readers than your competitor.

5. What topics would your visitors like to see next? Delivering what you are client or prospect wants is key to keeping them loyal to you. There are many ways that you can find out what your website visitors are looking for. Consider dropping in an online poll, or use some of that tracking software I mentioned earlier to ascertain what types of articles are attracting the most readers.

6. Where do your visitors typically go to find content that is related to their interests, job, or industry? By discovering the answer to these questions, you can reach out to specific sites and associations that they are engaged with and offer to provide guest content from time to time. This serves not only to help your SEO with back links, but also helps you gain authority as an expert within the chosen industry.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Understanding Your Analytics

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analytics

What the heck is analytics data, anyway?

Okay, your website is live and you have set up your appropriate social platforms for exposure and engagement. What now?

Depending on your business model and your service offerings, your website and other online platforms will serve different purposes.

If you are primarily offering custom services and engaging clients on a one-on-one basis, your online presence may be more about exposure and demonstrating authority in your market place. However, if you are offering products, especially through an online shopping cart, it is imperative that your online tools are all working together to get prospects into your sales funnel, converting visitors to satisfied customers.

Regardless of the purpose of your online presence, it is still important to understand the analytics data gathered from your website and social engagements.

Google analytics is most likely the most recognized analytics gathering tool, however many tools exist. In fact, most social media platforms have their own analytics tools within their platforms.

Okay, so you have accessed your analytics data but aren’t quite sure exactly what it means. Some of the data is self-explanatory, but some might require you to delve in a little bit deeper.

To understand how to get the best results from your online presence, be sure that you can answer the following five questions:


1.  What is a bounce rate, and why do certain pages have high bounce and exit rates?

A bounce rate is basically when a visitor comes to your site and exits directly from the entry page. It is also considered a bounce if a visitor remains inactive for 30 minutes or more on their entry page. But be sure that you understand what this data means. It is far more important to understand the bounce rate for first time visitors than recurring traffic. As long as someone is returning to your site, the bounce rate is not as significant. Find out what pages are recording the highest bounce rate and review them to see if they can be restructured in such a way to reduce the bounce.

2. Why are users leaving your site at specific points?

There are many reasons why you may be experiencing high bounce rates from specific pages. One reason is that perhaps your pages aren’t optimized properly. When you create a post, a “title tag” is developed which is used by search engines to figure out what your content is about. If your title isn’t even remotely connected to your topic, visitors might leave your site immediately. Make sure that you’re not playing games, creating a title tag that is highly searched in the hopes that you will attract visitors to your site. All you will do is create an animosity with the site visitor, and alienate them from ever visiting your site again.

Also, ensure that the content that you are providing for your visitors gives them something. Helping people understand an issue or providing helpful tips will create loyal visitors, increasing the potential to convert them to clients down the road.

And make sure that your content is presented in a way that is attractive and easy to read. Don’t mix too many fonts, as that tires the reader’s eyes, and be sure to include appropriate imagery.

And always include a call to action. Invite your visitors to take further steps within your site, either by signing up for a newsletter, a reading another article, or giving them a link to related materials. And engaged visitor doesn’t bounce.

3. Why are your conversions lower on mobile than on desktop?

Or perhaps you’re experiencing the reverse; less conversions on desktop than on mobile.

Is your site properly optimized for mobile? Some time ago, Google’s search results started penalizing those websites that were not mobile optimized.  Mobile continues to gain traction over desktop, and if your site takes too long to load or is not optimized for mobile viewers, you are guaranteed to lose visitors.

Most analytics tools will give you a breakdown of where your traffic is coming from. If you find that you are experiencing a higher bounce rate from mobile versus desktop, or vice versa, review your site to make sure that it is optimized, has good load speeds and simple navigation.

4. What is your demographic behavior?

Another great piece of data to review in your analytics is that of your demographics.

Analytics tools will give you a breakdown of the demographics that are visiting your site. You can learn where your traffic is coming from, i.e., from which geographic location. You can also discover ages, genders, and even income levels in some cases.

It is important to understand the demographics of your website visitors so that you can learn if you are targeting your market appropriately. If you are providing a product or service that is mostly geared towards businessmen between the ages of 35 and 54, but you learn that most visitors to your site are men aged 26 to 38, you will need to review how you are presenting your materials in order to capture more of your target market.

5. Does any particular webpage have a high average “time on page”?

The amount of time a visitor spends on your page can be bit of a confusing analytic. While at first glance, it may appear obvious that the longer someone spends on your site or your page, the more interested they are and what you have to say or offer. However, it can be a bit more complicated than that.

First of all, it’s important to understand how this metric is measured. The time that a visitor spends on your site is calculated as the difference between the recorded time of their last page request on the site and their first. Time on site doesn’t account for the time spent reading the last page in the session, therefore it can’t be said to be an accurate reflection of how your visitors are actually using your site.

Back to the understanding of the bounce; if someone is inactive on your site for a period of time, usually 30 minutes or more, it will be recorded as a bounce.

So review the pages the people are exiting from and their entry points to track pages of interest and to gauge what content and what cause of action are most effective.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

3 Reasons You Shouldn’t Ignore The Homepage

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homepage

Reports of the death of the homepage have been greatly exaggerated.

Once upon a time, the homepage was a valued part of the website. It served as the gateway to the company’s brand and was the driver of client engagement. In fact, it was so important that some companies had designated employees to manage their homepage.

Then everything changed. Along came our new best friends, “search” and “social”.

For several years now the way information is found over the Internet has evolved dramatically. Google, the dominant search engine, has continued to create more and more intuitive ways for information to be searched online.

Let’s add in the rise in social. Hundreds of social sharing platforms now exist, with the major players maintaining a stronghold on users and engagement. Indeed, in some instances, these social platforms have created entirely new ways for brands to engage with clients and prospects without them ever having to visit company’s homepage.

Thanks to leaked data from the New York Times in 2014 that showed a plunge in its homepage visitors, it soon became a commonly accepted belief that the homepage had lost its value.
Based on recent data, it has been found that as little as 5% of website visitors actually enter through the homepage, with the other 95% landing on specific pages that are mentioned via search or social media postings. This has led to marketers focusing their efforts in these areas, and rightfully so. However, ignoring the importance of the homepage can be a detriment, as it still serves an extremely valuable segment of your client and prospect pool.

Check out the following three reasons why you should not ignore the homepage:

1. Visitors to your homepage spend more time on your site.

Visitors who enter your website through the homepage signify loyalty to your brand. Based on some recent research, although only 5% of visitors come through the homepage, they actually account for 50% of all page views. This same data shows that visitors entering from search and social only view an average of three and 1.8 pages respectively per session, while visitors who enter from the homepage are more likely to view 10 to 30 pages per session. Research has shown that the longer people engage with the brand’s content, the higher the conversion rates, the larger the purchases, and the better the loyalty.

It’s true that “everything old is new again”. Companies are now starting to recognize that their homepage offers the opportunity to improve engagement with occasional visitors and convert them to loyal users. A corporate homepage is easy to personalize to provide visitors with content that will encourage them to engage, based on their interests.

2. Homepage visitors are interested in a wider range of information and offerings.

It makes sense that those visitors to your website who entered through social media or search results are there for one thing: to check out that article or product that was shared via social media postings. The visitor drops in to check out the article and then immediately leave your site.

When a visitor enters through the homepage, it is generally because they are looking for a number of articles pertaining to a specific issue. They usually have a broader scope of interests, making it easier for companies to showcase their content. Viral content, such as that shared on social media platforms, is most likely clicked on because of a compelling headline, whereas articles found on a homepage are more likely to be clicked on because of the topic.

Many publishers are beginning to recognize and knowledge that the homepage has been ignored and is largely an untapped resource. By curating content on a homepage, your business can provide visitors with the most recent and relevant articles, making it easy for them to find those topics that interest them. While search and social can deliver a visitor to your website, a compelling homepage can encourage an ongoing relationship.

3. Check your website statistics. Homepage traffic indicates your marketing successes.

There are three things to focus on when it comes to your website: developing an audience, acquiring new users, and existing client engagement.

Perhaps one of the most difficult challenges today is getting the one-time visitor to return to the website for more information after they checked out that article that they found on social media. Measuring the number of visitors who end up on the homepage after finding the site via search or social is a good indicator of how well those campaigns are performing.

Investing in a well-designed, thoughtful homepage is simply good business. Although it may not pull the traffic numbers, there are other ways to measure its value. And experience has shown that a great homepage experience can deliver an extraordinary result that search and social simply can’t produce.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

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