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The Super Bowl remains entrenched as the ultimate TV event in America, averaging 111.9 million TV viewers for last year's Super Bowl 50. The actual number is really larger than that, as the 111.9 million number doesn't include those who watched it at viewing parties, restaurants or streaming on the Web.
In marketing campaigns, any event with a large number of people is an opportunity for marketing success. The Super Bowl has the numbers, for sure. In addition to this, the marketing blitz surrounding the game is actively welcomed, in a sense, by viewers. The commercials, the cost of which totaled a record $377 million in spending for Super Bowl 50, are an integral part of the viewing experience.
The Super Bowl is both an event with massive viewership numbers and a viewer base that's generally receptive to marketing throughout the night. It's the type of night where even those who despise commercials will be interested in the commercial content, if only for the purpose of seeing what millions in ad purchasing buys.
This all makes for a superb marketing campaign opportunity. Using the Super Bowl in your marketing efforts is something every business should consider. Here are some tips to get you started.
Integrating social media into a marketing campaign is practical in 2017. The Super Bowl generates plenty of online buzz, so it's a good idea to center a marketing campaign around getting users of social media-driven apps to simultaneously post/tweet/snap about the Super Bowl while promoting a product.
As evidenced by multiple campaigns, PepsiCo is well aware of the game's ample marketing potential, especially as an NFL sponsor. They partnered with Snapchat, whose app has filters where users can change the appearance of their surroundings or face. With this built-in feature already in mind, they simply added a Snapchat filter that emulated a Gatorade bath. It certainly helped that celebrities like Serena Williams publicly took part.
Any campaign that further immerses fans into the game while allowing them to visibly showcase their enthusiasm on social media has extreme marketing potential.
Online marketing campaigns can be very successful, although some of the most successful marketing campaigns have found a fairly even distribution between an online and offline presence. A great example of this, with the Super Bowl in mind, occurred with Uber's PuppyBowl campaign.
Here, they teamed up with various organizations around the country to find new homes for dogs. Users could request the "PUPPIES" option in the app and have a puppy squad arrive, where you can "enjoy a 15-minute cuddle huddle" with the puppies. In most cities, you're eligible to adopt them, as well. The fee was $30 and proceeds went to supporting shelters and rescues.
It was a win-win campaign that was fun for consumers, found some dogs a nice home and showcased the Uber service and app to current and new users alike. The campaign was certainly a touchdown!
It might be ideal to have everything mapped out ahead of a marketing campaign, though sometimes things occur spontaneously. A quick wit on marketing platforms in response to pop culture phenomena or well-known incidents can go viral and achieve great (and free!) word-of-mouth.
Few examples prove this better than Oreo's response to the third-quarter power outage during Super Bowl XLVII. Soon after this occurred, Oreo tweeted an ad featuring a sole Oreo, with the captions "Power Out? No problem" and "You can still dunk in the dark." Tens of thousands of re-tweets and Facebook likes followed, allowing Oreo to get what was essentially a free premium ad spot and become one of the more buzzed-about products during the Super Bowl, without a commercial costing millions.
While appealing to both Super Bowl teams may come across as somewhat desperate, a marketing campaign can do so successfully if engagement and fun is allocated evenly. For example, a car dealership could drum up substantial buzz prior to the Super Bowl by featuring a custom-created vehicle featuring the NFL teams. Either as a physical showcase or via pictures on social media, adorning your product with team-related coloring and design is a great idea to attract attention.
Just be sure not to show too much favoritism toward one side, unless you're in a one-dimensional territory (like a car dealership located in Atlanta or Boston).
Social media and smartphones have made creating and sharing video content easier than ever. This has made crowdsourcing marketing content easier than ever. Especially for an event like the Super Bowl, you can bet that fans are "game" to get involved.
Doritos have employed this strategy brilliantly over the past decade or so in the Super Bowl. They invite fans to create their own Super Bowl ad, competing for the opportunity to have it aired on game night. This engages fans directly and saves on advertising costs, for sure. Another one of their strategies, to buy tickets for fans under the condition they wear orange to create a Dorito-shaped section in the crowd, was another attention-grabbing strategy that worked well.
"Pregame" refers to the week or so before kickoff. Research shows that many major Super Bowl commercials already have millions of views before the big game. It's akin to the holiday season, where build-up buzz is just as, if not more, important than the big day. With millions being spent on these campaigns, many have a specific schedule in mind for having the campaign endure, rather than just appearing as a flash-in-the-pan.
Strategies to maintain commercial relevance despite an early release often involve social media engagement, or hashtag implementation like Doritos' #crashthesuperbowl or Avocados from Mexico's #AvosinSpace. These all give fans a reason to keep being engaged beyond seeing the ad for the first time.
These six strategies should help enhance your marketing campaign so that it takes full advantage of the Super Bowl, in addition to the massive viewership and viral potential it brings.
Lexie Lu is a freelance graphic designer and blogger. She keeps up with the latest design news and always has some coffee in close proximity. She writes on Design Roast and can be followed on Twitter @lexieludesigner.
The post How to Use the Super Bowl in Your Marketing Campaign appeared first on Phoenix Online Media.]]>
Below you'll find several tips. Many of them (as a business owner) you can do yourself. If you're a tech savvy business owner comfortable with hosting, editing files and such, you can likely take care of all of them yourself. Some, you may have to hire a webmaster to complete, and depending on the value you place on your time, you may want to hire someone good to complete all these steps. The right person will give you a fair deal assuming your site is coded well and easy to work with. If you have a WordPress website, this guide will be easier for you to handle on your own. If you don't have WordPress, these steps may be a little more difficult. If you're on Wix or Weebly or another Free website builder, I'd recommend ditching it, but that's just me. We recently switched a Wix website to WordPress and ranked it from #6 to #1 in little over 4 days, just because of the software abilities of WordPress.
Remember, this is a beginner's guide to seo, so some of these things you may already have done, which is great. We will put together a more advanced guide shortly and since you signed up to receive this, you will receive that as well.
One thing for sure, these steps will put your website and business in a better position, guaranteed and they are a gift from us to you. We love sharing information and if you ever want more tips, reach out to our friendly staff, we welcome the opportunity to serve you. Finally, you'll see a lot of different recommendations online. We read all the articles and do our own research and come up with our own recommendations and processes. All articles you find online are recommendations, opinions and SEO Tips, go with the median and be on the safe side. But most of the stuff you see ranking in the top #7 should be solid information you can rely on.
*These are probably the most difficult things on the list
In some cases, website designers and developers don't know much about SEO. Please note that I said "some" because there are website designers and developers that do know SEO basics and advanced SEO, and can properly optimize your site. If your website designer or developer does not know about SEO, or didn't take the time to properly optimize your site it's likely that your page titles, h1 tags and meta descriptions are not helping you out. Here's how to check, and yes you need to check each page. If you have a website that's more than 15 – 20 + pages, it may be beneficial to do #9 First, wait until Google crawls your site, and then it will tell you what's duplicated making things easier. The only reason I recommend you do some on your own is so that you get familiar with the process and understand what is going on. By the way, Page Titles and H1 tags are valued a lot by search engines, so they need to be great, and Meta Descriptions tell users what your page is about and if you can get them to click thru to your page (increase your CTR) this can help your rankings*.
*If they click thru to your page and bounce (or leave) then that doesn't help so make sure your content is great. User first content.
Discovering Where You Stand Now with Page Titles, Meta Descriptions & H1 Tags
To see what you have on each page currently, you need to visit each page. Yes, each page 1 by 1 and be prepared to take notes. On each page, unless you're going to complete the page changes right then, if that's the case, just take note what you did and the date you did it and the page you changed.
In all major browsers except Safari, you can visit the page and click CTRL + U. This will open a new window and allow you to view at least some of the code that renders the page.
If you are using Safari, you need to click CTRL + ALT + U. This will open a new window and allow you to view at least some of the code that renders the page.
So, for this simple step, we are checking to ensure we are not using the same Page Titles, H1 tags and Meta Descriptions for each page.
We need to find these three elements on each page. To do this, after you are looking at the code in the new window, type: CTRL + F using your keyboard.
Tool You Will Want: Character Count Tool for your Meta Descriptions & Page Titles
(you quickly realize why that tool is important as you read further through this guide)
Finding the Page Title
(Remember when on the page click CTRL + U in most browsers and CTRL + ALT + U in Safari)
Finding the Page Title
To find the page title, typein the search box.
The Page title will be the words used between&
Example:Free Guide SEO to Boost Your Site | Phoenix Online Media
*Only change the words between theandtags, and if you are doing it as you go, save after every change.
Page Title Tip: Moz's 2016 Edition of Title Length Recommends 60 Characters, Most Experts are comfortable in the 50 – 57/60 range and it's good to end the title with your brand name if possible. Read that article, there is a lot of good information in it – it's Moz's style.
Advanced Page Title Tip: Hire someone, or if your able, or know what you customers are searching for all ready, these keywords should be in your Page Title Tags. On the home page, we recommend something general that covers all of your services or "themes" your website like "Internet Marketing" or "Computer Repair" or "Power Washing. And because local optimization is amazing for small businesses and can literally double your business (we hear it daily), you'll want to put the name of your business in the title tag.
Example: Mesa Computer Repair Services | XYZ Computer Repair
The words closest to the left, get the most "power," but it's not life changing power. We have tips below to help with better local optimization.
Finding the Meta Description
(Remember when on the page click CTRL + U in most browsers and CTRL + ALT + U in Safari)
To find the Meta Description, type
The Meta Description will be the words used between
Example:"description" content="(480) 539-2900 – This free guide outlines a few quick tips to better optimize your website and improve the chances you make more money online. Got Questions? Call us" />
*Only change the words between the quotes after content="Change the words here" />
Meta Description Tip: This is one that tends to vary the most, because in theory, you can have as many word characters as you want, that said search engines truncate words that go over their max, and that may mean your most important Call to Action (CTA) or message won't be seen. At Phoenix Online Media we recommend staying at 165 characters or below. That said, there are agencies that recommend Meta Descriptions of 170 characters. They are not wrong, I've seen Google show 170 characters, but to be safe and always ensure you show everything, we recommend 165. Here's a great article by Yoast about Meta Descriptions – read it take notes and enjoy
Advanced Meta Description Tip: As mentioned earlier increasing your CTR from search engines to your website will help your rank. It's been proven by many. Here are a few things every Meta Description needs: Your keywords, a Call to Action (CTA), a Compelling Reason to Read Your Article, Be Persuasive, make sure your fulfilling the Meta Descriptions promise with the content after they click thru, and write in in a manner that gets them to want to act. We also like putting the company phone number at the very beginning, but that does take up space and make writing Meta Descriptions more difficult.
Finding the H1 Tags
(Some designers don't use them, so don't be surprised if you don't find them, if you don't, get them to make whatever they wanted to be your main headline and H1 Tag quickly.)
(Remember when on the page click CTRL + U in most browsers and CTRL + ALT + U in Safari)
As mentioned earlier, H1 tags can be very powerful elements on a web page, so they must be present. There's no rule to length, but they are usually the largest text on the page, so keep them short if possible. Generally, we like to use something like the Page Title, but not the exact same thing as the page title – a slight variation.
Page Title: Wisdom Teeth Extractions in McKinney, TX | XYZ Dental H1 Tag: Affordable McKinney Wisdom Tooth Extractions
(Regarding keywords just got wisdom teeth extractions, the city twice, brand name and we got affordable, which Search Engines will also associate with cheap and inexpensive plus hundreds of variations!)
*Surprisingly enough some web designers and developers don't even use H1 tags, so don't be shocked if you don't find one on your page. Just contact us, or your webmaster and ask that they are incorporated into your page.
(Some designers don't use images on every page and they should, but more common is that they don't optimize and add an Alt tag. Again, some not all there are very good web designers and web developers.
(Remember when on the page click CTRL + U in most browsers and CTRL + ALT + U in Safari)
To find the Alt Tag, type alt= In the search box.
If it's blank, then we need to look at the image and describe the image. Luckily most images relate to a page, so we can usually get a keyword in the Alt tag, but don't be spammy.
Example: Fresh Pizza Coming Out of the Oven (is the image) Alt=Hot Pizza Coming out of the Oven
We see Alt tags stuffed we keywords daily, I don't like it because of two reasons A) it's not good for disability users B) Google will make an algorithm that they probably already made that will recognize this and it just gives your site bad street cred with Google.
Regarding image optimization, this also deals a lot with how fast pages load. We want all images to be smaller than 300 KB, it can happen, it can be done and it may be something that you need help with, but there are online tools (I think free ones, but in fear of recommending something that will bloat your computer, I'll just say that there are probably tools and/or you can download them all, send them to a designer and say I want these all back 300 KB or less. Large Slider images will be difficult, but we can get them down quite about. I've seen quality ones in the 500 KB range.
KB = Kilobytes
Takeaways & Tips: Don't add keywords to images if there's not an opportunity.
Think users first. Every page needs an image and every image needs an alt tag.
For well over a year Google has given secure sites with an SSL certificate a slight bump. You are transmitting user information from your site to your server, so it should be protected, and users feel safe when they see the green bar. You have tons of options; the easiest and cheapest route is Domain Validation. It's quick, easy and provides the security you need. There are tons of great companies that offer SSL certificates and we do too, but you must host with us, so you'll end up with stellar hosting and the best deal on SSL certificates. That said, all hosts sell them companies like Comodo, Thawte, Symantec, GeoTrust, RapidSSL and hundreds of others. It's not an option if you have an ecommerce store, you need a SSL certificate. They are relatively in expensive, they make users feel safe on your site, you get a badge, and you know information sent from your contact forms is encrypted.
If you're looking for more expensive options there are Organizational Validation and Extended Validation. They get pricey, but they give higher insurance coverage, and the better ones will show your company name in Green next to your URL in the browser.
Recap: Inexpensive way for a rank boost, encrypted content from your contact forms, they make users feel safe, you get a badge, and a little piece of mind with some insurance.
There are great hosting companies, and a lot worse ones. Unfortunately, the bad ones spend the most on marketing and give you the worst service. As funny as it sounds, the bad hosts cost more (unless you truly only host – no emails), because they nickel and dime you for everything. Then, they throw you in a mid-to-low security environment with thousands of other websites. So you are sharing a server in most cases with literally thousands of other businesses. Those other sites may have security weaknesses, which may become your security weaknesses. This isn't a blanket statement, some cheap hosting companies do have decent security measures, but nothing compared to the higher priced hosting organizations.
Great Customer Service is Priceless
Then, there's the customer service. Low cost hosting companies have "tiered systems" for customer support i.e. Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, and the lower Tier reps aren't much help, but I will say that in general they (as in the cheaper hosting companies, do try to provide good customer service.
Great hosting companies typically hire skilled technicians that would all be considered tier 3 reps at the cheaper organizations. The first person you call knows about domain support, hosting support, DNS record support, Optimizing your site for faster load times and so on. So, forget about the longer wait times, the fact that they always try to sell you more services, and the passing small problems around to different departments trained for your specific problem, and just focus on the company's ability to quickly solve your problem and not waste your time. To me, it makes sense to save time for a cup of coffee a month.
Great hosting companies and the security measures they put in place can help ensure your site doesn't get hacked, and that it's always up and loads fast. Fast loading sites are a ranking factor and security is too, so take it serious. The right hosting companies will work with you to ensure your site is getting the resources it needs all the time. Have you ever been to your site on say GoDaddy, Host Monster, Blue Host, Host Gator, 1 and 1, FatCow or any of the other extremely cheap hosting companies and noticed that your site is slower than molasses? Again, the hosting is cheap, but the add-ons, well they add up. Do yourself and your customers a favor and fork over $3 – $5 more per month for great hosting. Phoenix Online Media offers amazing hosting through a top tier company and we offer it cheaper than the company offers it. We also offer 2-sets of off-site backups. Plus, we have a partnership with a top-tier (best in class) company that always scans your site for malware, gives you the same firewall financial institutions use, and automatically removes malware if it miraculously makes it onto your site. We don't make money of hosting; we make money from taking care of people, because our team and our leadership team believes that the people you take care of, will take care of you.
The last thing you want is your rankings to drop because of a slow site or for your customers to bounce because they expect fast loading web pages. Customers are impatient.
Here are links to each place:
Google My Business (GMB)
Bing Places (AKA Bing Local)
These two profiles are arguably the best first profiles to get setup and verified for your business. Plus, they have an incredible amount of features to make your business look incredible (first impressions matter). We are in no way recommending that these are the end all great directories; there are hundreds of great directories, these are important and if done right can help your business quickly move towards more traffic and as mentioned earlier, they have the tools to show your business' best qualities in a great way. Both processes are very similar and very easy to do. Complete everything, do the first one, save the information you used in the first one, and use it on the second to speed things up. If possible, use unique business descriptions that include your keywords in each directory.
When writing business, descriptions don't stuff keywords, write naturally and think about your users. What do they want to know to decide to call or visit you? Then create a strong call to action. Google My Business is by far the better in terms of traffic potential, but some data does suggest that Bing users buy more online.
Make sure you do fully complete your profiles as much as you can: logo, address, phone number, social media links, photos, photos and more photos etc. prior to their verification process. In 90% of cases, after you finish the quick profile setup, both organizations will send you a postcard with a pin# to your business. You need this to fully verify the profiles and take advantage of all their wonderful features. If you're that lucky 10%, they'll give you a quick call and get everything done in a few short minutes.
I'm not sure why but some people I talk to assume that if Google knows they are an insurance agency, that they also know every insurance plan the sell and the details about the company's plans, plan options, carriers (if it's a broker) that the broker works with and so on. It's not possible. Every business is unique, which is why there are more than a few kinds of each business in each industry.
I write this portion hoping that you have done keyword research, or that you have a pretty good idea of what users are going to use to find your business online. I talk to a lot of business owners and for the most part, they do know the main things users are searching to find them. They just don't know much about the long-tail words or hidden gems. Remember, this guide is to get you to a better place than you are now, future information we share will get you to a better place. With that in mind, you need an actual web page for each product or service you over. An overall "Services" or "Products" page cut it. It does give Google and other search engines a better idea of what your business does, but it doesn't give them as much of an idea as your competitors. If you want to win online, you must be better than the competition.
Simple Example of Creating Pages for Main Products & Services
Let's focus on the Services Page. On that page, you'll want to list out your services:
Auto Insurance, Life Insurance, Home Insurance.
And write brief introductions about each service with a nice picture next to the text, and a read more or learn more button linking to the new: Auto Insurance Page, the new Life Insurance Page, the new Home Insurance Page. Don't forget that these images need to have Alt tags.
Tip: You'll also want to alter your main navigation so users can hover over your services page and quickly get to what they are looking for.
These new pages need to talk about why you are different, what your benefits are, what separates you from the competition, your experience, give them some free tips and advice, and add a call to action on each of the pages towards the top left or right side of the page. A short contact form or button that is connected to a pop-up or your contact page will do for now. If you remember from an earlier section, we recommended that every page has at least one image and that each of those images have Alt tags. Ensure these new pages do too, and that they have a Page Title, Meta Description and an H1 tag as mentioned above (don't forget the city). Make sure the pictures represent the page, so that you can have an opportunity to legitimately add a keyword in your Alt tag.
*Make sure you save all the passwords when creating these accounts.
All too often I talk with business owners and they have no idea how many visits they get, how many conversions they get, how long people stay on their site and on-and-on. I blame the designer/developer because it's a must for every website, but if they offered and you turned it down, then I blame you.
Setting up a Google Analytics account will give you access to more information about your website visitors than you'll ever likely need to know, and it's free, and it's easy to use and set up. Here's a link to a page where you can sign up for a free account.
After signing up, walk through the steps: Give the Account a Name (Maybe an Acronym), Give the Actual Website Name, Then, enter in the actual URL. If you already have an SSL certificate in place, you will need to choose the https version of the URL from the dropdown, Select the Industry Category, select your time zone make sure the boxes you want checked are checked and click on the blue button that says "Get Tracking Id." Copy the code on notepad, notepad ++, or another text editor and add it to your website between the closing </head> tag. If you need help give us a call or contact your webmaster. After that's connected, test to make sure it works, and you're off to the races with data you can use to improve your business.
Example of Google Analytics Tracking Code
Your Google Search Console Account has so much data, and so many recommendations and ways to improve your business that I'm excited just thinking you may set one up after reading this. If you do this after setting up your Analytics account and verifying that it is working, it will make the process a lot easier. Here's a link to Google's Search Console (formerly called Google Webmaster's). Once logging in, they are going to ask you to add your website. Google recommends you add all variations of your website, for example, if you have an SSL certificate, you will be adding 4 versions. If you do not have an SSL certificate, you will be adding two versions.
Example of 4 Versions (SSL) https://www.xyzcompany.com https://xyzcompany.com http://www.xyzcompany.com http://xyzcompany.com Example of 2 Versions (No SSL) http://www.xyzcompany.com http://xyzcompany.com
*The order that you enter them in does not matter, but you need to enter both the non-and non-www version of your website.
After entering in the first URL, Google will want you to authenticate that you do own the domain. The easiest way is to use the tab that says Alternate method and choose Google Analytics.
After it verifies, you'll go to a dashboard, but since you want to enter in more properties, you'll want to click on the red Search Console word in in the top left. This will take you to a page where you can add the remainder of your properties. To add the remainder of your websites/properties, click on the red button
Continue this process until all four or all two properties are added, and if you get an SSL certificate later, make sure you go back to Google's Search Console to add the new properties.
Tip: Go to each properties dashboard and add your site's sitemap if you have one, if you don't, we will cover that in our next guide.
Responsive Design
I'm not going to say much about this because if you don't have a mobile/tablet friendly website by now, you probably don't care. For those of you that don't care, and just don't think it's worth it, these stats may change your mind: In most industries, mobile traffic has surpassed desktop traffic (very few industries haven't but in the coming months they surely will), in 2015 40% of Black Friday sales were made on a mobile device, more than half of Google searches come from mobile devices, and Google's share of mobile search traffic 89%.
Get a Responsive website. We don't care if you get one from us, even though it'll be the best built website you can get and compared to the big guys that do half as much, it will be more affordable – guaranteed.
Just get one, it's best for your business and if you do business with Phoenix Online Media or anyone else, get a mobile site, because we care about your business even if you're not a client. Go Responsive today.
Schema such as microdata and others have been around for a while. If you are using something other than JSON-LD, you'll still get some benefit and you do not need to switch today. However, JSON-LD Schema is the preferred format by Google and what Google does, others usually follow. So, I'd think about switching to JSON-LD quick. It's amazing because it tells search engines more about your site; it can help them better categorize your site, your products, your services and a whole lot more. Every site should have some form of Schema, but in the next 6-Months, every site should be using JSON-LD. Here's a link to Google's official announcement that they prefer it – click here.
If you can do it on your own, great, there are plenty of examples (like the one below) that you can change, or you can get a webmaster or Phoenix Online Media to help.
An Example of JSON-LD for A Restaurant is Below
Good luck and if you've followed this guide, you're on your way to a better performing website.
If you can do us a favor and respond with the type of website you are using to support@phoenixonlinemedia, we can ensure that we provide options in our next guide to help most of you. Thank you for downloading this guide.
Best of luck
The post Tips: Beginners Guide on How to Crush the Competition with a Great Website appeared first on Phoenix Online Media.]]>
This SEO guide will focus on SEO basics, onsite optimization, Web optimization best practices and techniques, local search engine optimization, and the most effective search engine optimization strategies of 2016. We may have titled this post "Phoenix SEO: How to Optimize Your Website in 2016," but this free website optimization and search engine guide is applicable in any city! We love the Metropolitan area of Phoenix, but the information in this guide is applicable to handle SEO for any business, anywhere. So, use this guide to learn search engine optimization and how to optimize your website in any city throughout the nation.
Fair warning, many of the things you'll read on this page will be repeated over and over. That probably means that you should pay close attention to it – especially if your goal of reading this guide is to learn how to do SEO on your own (DIY SEO) and optimize your website yourself.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work involved to improve a website and promote it to increase visibility on search engines, which usually translates into an increase in organic visitor traffic relevant to your website. Additionally, it's the application of using each search engine's best practices to optimize a site and in doing so, keeping user experience first.
Here's a quick link to Google's Webmaster Guidelines, review it, understand it, and follow it: webmaster guidelines
Many details are involved in good SEO, from the words on each page, the words used in Page Titles, H tags, internal links, alt tags, image file names, on-site content and on-site content types, consistent name, address and phone number information (NAP), social signals, local signals, citations from other sites, how fast your site loads, the presence of a SSL certificate, the sites that you link to elsewhere on the Web, the websites that link to you, and the structure, code and placement of that code on your site. Trust us when we tell you that this only scratches the surface when were are talking about the best way to optimize a website. But if you nail these basics, you'll be light years ahead of most of the competition and these SEO for newbie tips could help you dominate a relatively easy industry. Forbes' contributor Jason DeMers recently put together a Fundamental Guide to SEO in 2016, which is worth checking out if you have some free time.
Some of the basics of SEO are above. However, search engines tweak their algorithms continuously by utilizing hundreds of evolving factors. After all, users expect search engines such as Google and Bing* to find relative information for them, instantly and on-demand. Their goal is to bring a user to the exact page that will answer their query, allow them to buy a product, or learn more about X, Y or Z. Because of this, you'll see that most search engine results lead to pages within a website making it easier for users to find exactly what their looking for in one click. Does your website offer a page for each keyword(s) related to your products and services? If not, it should. That said, don't make several pages for similar keywords, that may lead to page cannibalization and hurt your efforts.
*Bing & Yahoo! are essentially the same search engine, so we'll use Bing throughout this guide to keep things simple.
There is no faking it in 2016; search engines are getting smarter by the day. Don't bother trying blackhat techniques such as keyword stuffing, buying links, or intricate link wheels. Don't bother using grey hat techniques like stuffing alt tags with keywords not related to the image, overusing keywords on pages and making similar pages (with basically the same text) over and over just to rank for different keywords in different cities. Yep, we know that in terms of black hat and grey hat techniques, we just mentioned a fraction of tactics. Trust us, this is for your benefit.
Be real and genuine. Focus your efforts on building a good quality website that provides a great experience for your users, includes amazing content, and you'll be far ahead of the game.
For this reason, this search engine optimization (SEO) basics section will cover the most important basic elements of great SEO.
The number one rule is to focus on your website visitors first. Give them remarkable content that invites them to stay on your site and visit several other pages. Content is more than an article, it can be anything from an infographic, stellar image, video, street views of projects, or a power point presentation – be creative. Search engines "see" this behavior (user engagement, lower bounce rates, higher time-on site etc), and they reward your site for it with better quality metrics and higher rankings.
Beyond that, SEO experts agree that in order to get websites on search engines with meaningful rankings you'll need: high-quality links, a diverse link profile from multiple domains, the aforementioned exceptional and relevant content, consistent updated content, social signals (content shared and liked by social users) and a technically clean and fast website. Additionally, keeping information about your business up-to-date is also very important, this means that information about your business matches information found on directories throughout the world. Finally, reviews and responding to reviews are increasingly becoming more important and there's a lot you can do with review data. For example, you can improve business processes, optimize your responses to reviews, and improve customer service. We fully believe that a review generation program should be part of every SEO campaign.
We know that this is a given, but we feel the need to continuously drill home how critical keywords are to SEO. As a user of search engines, you certainly understand how important words, phrases, and sentences are to finding the information you need. When working on SEO, you are reverse engineering that process, by serving up those keywords to people seeking your information. That said, do not be "spammy" and do not overuse keywords. On another topic, Google is increasingly giving websites higher rankings if those websites take the time to use Latent Semantic Indexing keywords. It's a fancy way of using synonyms and different variations (related) of keywords and phrases. Google uses LSI to try to determine what a page is about. An easy and quite frequently used example is a page about Apple, by using LSI Google can easily determine if the page is about an apple, or the brand Apple. One key thing about LSI is that trends matter, some phrases or related keywords can change based on trends. So keep trends in mind when you are using this website optimization technique. There are tools online to help with coming up with these terms:
Free SEO Tools to Help with Optimizing Your Phoenix Landing Page with LSI Words
Many years ago, Google put together its search quality team, which is responsible for ensuring users get the best possible user experience by making sure that key signals of quality websites align well with results on search engine pages. Their job description is straightforward "A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them — and in what order." They make changes sometimes daily and hundreds annually. Their job consists of one main goal – only one goal – improve user experience. One take away from the post about Google's Search Quality Team is that PageRank is still used today. Yes, it's only a part of their ranking algorithm, but it's still used and that does mean that backlinks matter.
Evaluating Websites that May Not Follow Best Practices
Yes, we know this is a guide to help you learn how to optimize your website, but we feel that you should understand that Google does penalize websites algorithmically and manually.
Google uses both its algorithms and a manual approach to reviewing pages on the Web, in a process designed to offer up the highest quality information their web spam team works to ensure spammers are not doing malicious activities to alter their rankings. Although Google has spent lots of time and lots of money investing in algorithmic programs to find the best data for each search, some situations call for the human eye and the human touch. Here are a few reasons why a site may need a manual evaluation: hacked sites, user-generated spam, pure spam, cloaked images, hidden text, keyword stuffing, spammy structured markup and sneaky redirects. Additionally, sites that launch hundreds of pages over a short period tend to look spammy to a search engine, but it can be legit if you're building out your site or re-launching it on a new URL. The bottom line is to focus on satisfying your human users, not on chasing algorithms or doing things that may result in an algorithmic or manual penalty.
Focus your time and energy on big-picture items that influence your SEO. These begin with the all-important user experience, great quality content, and relevancy to your website. Of course, the mechanisms that tell search engines about your site are crucial; quality subject matter comes from the depth of your content, your social media signals, your backlink profile, technical issues with your site and your internal linking to other relevant pages. User experience improves with original content, quick page loading, pages that fulfill their promise and easy site navigation. Authority enhances a site's longevity, and the quality of its backlinks plays a major role in this. If you are linking to good sites, and they are linking to you, then you gain authority. Authority sites also get indexed quicker and deeper.
For those just getting started in SEO, it will pay in spades to study Search Engine Land's Periodic Table of SEO Elements. It will help you learn the ropes quickly!
The sitemap tells search engines about all the pages on your site, even those that might not be easy to find. A sitemap is very helpful if your site is dynamic or if it has pages with images or rich AJAX that can be hard for bots to discover. It is also helpful for new sites with few links, or sites that have numerous pages not well linked. Sitemaps help search engines do a good job of reading your website and finding your site's content.
While Google is the big dog when it comes to search engines, don't forget about Bing. It does hold a considerable share of the search market. While focusing on user experience as we've advocated will work for Bing as well, you should do technical audits of your site for both search engines, to make sure you have not missed any important element.
Make an account with both Google and Bing, and access each Webmaster Tools (Google recently renamed Google Webmasters and it's now Search Console) area to ensure your website has proper indexing. Beyond indexing, they help you evaluate your internal links, diagnose or fix problems, as well as your website's backlinks and which keywords are sending you traffic. Once you get into Webmaster tools you'll see tons of valuable data. One very important piece of data we love relates to traffic your site gets now. You can see the clicks it's getting, the ranking positions it's showing up for on average, the impressions and your click-thru rate (CTR). This data will help you identify low hanging fruit and help you target keywords that can dramatically increase your sites traffic. You never know, you may find that the keywords your tracking and going after are very different than the ones you should be going after.
Leveraging exceptional content is the right way to engage your audience. SEO combines art with science, and content is the way to get maximum results. It can help you create your brand, draw backlinks from relevant quality sites, build relationships, and position yourself in your industry. Keep in mind that quality and consistency are crucial. With that said, here is a good content marketing strategy for a small business:
Remember, great quality and lengthy content will work best, both for users and search engines. Studies have shown that long content consistently ranks higher than thin content. Consistency is crucial; maintain a regular publishing schedule. Choose three primary keywords and have a list of others to target. When you improve those keywords, choose three more. Push your content to your social media profiles by integrating it with your blog, but don't do it in a manner that's "me, me, me" share other things too. Facebook and Twitter are two of the highest traffic referral sources for some sites, so be sure that you have profiles and are active regularly on both. People love to know about companies, so share company events, company awards, employee new hires, and most importantly, share information related to your industry that is not related to your company often. No one wants to talk to someone that consistently talks about theirself.
Getting people to your website is great, keeping them there is better, but converting them to subscribers or buyers is the ultimate! The Internet highways are becoming more crowded by the day, and subscribers will help maintain a steady flow of traffic and help keep your brand top of mind. Be sure to set up conversions using Google Analytics, so you know your conversion rate and can improve it by tweaking things on your site. Tip: Tweak one thing at a time and make a note of when and what you changed, so you can see what affect it had on conversions. Additionally, there is software available (even in Google Analytics) that allows for split testing and if you're a wizard, you can even setup multivariate testing scenarios.
Keyword research tools will help you find the popular phrases and keywords to target that are not super-competitive. These tools include Ubersuggest, Keyword Explorer, SEMrush, ahrefs, Keyword Generator, Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner to name a few (some are free and some are paid, the free ones are sufficient). You can also analyze your website to see which keywords are drawing traffic and sales already, and look for related keywords or create new content that includes theses keywords. Another tip is to check out your competitors' top pages and see which keywords work best for them, keeping in mind that long-tail keywords are more natural, can be more effective and are generally easier to rank for. Here are some more onsite tips:
Credit: moz.com
Consider the following techniques and best practices.
Infographics are some of the best content you can use to draw traffic to your website, so we thought using a good one here would help show you what it can do. This particular infographic is from the SEOBook website, and shows how search works, beginning with the creation of a piece of content, and then following it as it's indexed and helps with search engine optimization.
The concept of related topics means that when you see a keyword such as "weddings," you'll likely also see flowers, wedding dresses, tuxedos, photographers, and caterers. Google sees these related keywords frequently associated, and builds graphs between them. Therefore, when you are working on SEO or search marketing, you need to be aware of related topics and include them for optimal ranking. This is related to Latent Semantic Indexing.
With each page we create, we attempt to drive the ranking and clicks as well. We want our page to have the best-optimized snippet in the search results. When someone searches for wedding wear on his or her smartphone, that person might find your snippet that says, "What to wear to a beach wedding," dated June 15, 2016, so its timeliness is apparent. This is essentially your ad; here is timely advice on beach wedding wear! Click. Optimize that, make it interesting, remove the date, unless you're going to update it regularly. Meta Descriptions are very important and play a major role in how many people are going to click on your listing and visit your site (people clicking from the search result to your website). It's your chance to create an amazing ad that is interesting and entices them to click. Don't forget, Google does reward websites that get high click through rates (CTR), so craft each meta description carefully.
There are increasing opportunities to use schema markups, depending on your niche. There are numerous schema opportunities for news, recipes, and even fitness video. As time goes on, there will increasingly be more and more opportunities to use schema to enhance your website, tell Google more about your website and make how your website shows up in search results better. Google prefers JSON-LD markup, so we recommend using it.
Getting your content out there and shared generously should be your goal. Make sure the content is better than what already is ranking for your keywords; provide unique value and a fresh perspective on the topic. Consider your exposure options for your content, and get your content out to as many options as possible. This will help in a variety of ways including giving your content more opportunities to be linked to from other websites.
The post Tips: Phoenix SEO How to Optimize Your Website appeared first on Phoenix Online Media.]]>
I know, I know. You've read this before. It literally is on every list related to efficiency or productivity, which is why this article would be incomplete without it. I don't care if you keep your to do list on a notepad, or on an electronic platform, but get it done. One of the most important tools to keep you on track is the To Do List. Not only does it keep you organized and focused, it also provides a nice psychological boost each time you cross off an item. Enter all the tasks you need to complete, breaking down large ones into action steps, and prioritize accordingly. The key? Find a system that works for you, ensuring you'll keep using it. You can keep it old school by using the aforementioned paper and pen, or become a task master creating a spreadsheet or tracking document, or downloading one of the many to do list apps available for Android, iOS and even Microsoft platforms. Many of these phone apps can integrate with your email making it easy to assign tasks directly from email, and almost all of them have a desktop version you can use at work.
As mentioned above, If you choose the technology route, you're not short on options. A simple spreadsheet makes adding new tasks and deleting completed ones easy. It doesn't boast much in the way of bells and whistles, but it gets the job done and, thanks to applications like Google Drive and OneDrive, portability isn't an issue. There are also several effective apps to choose from with widely varying levels of features. Some of the most popular include:
· Any.do: works within browsers on desktop and tablet platforms , on both Android and iOS platforms and it has a Chrome Browser add on extension. It handles recurring tasks, and includes options like a quick review of tasks slated for that day. Separating tasks into multiple categories e.g. work life, play, shopping etc. And you can share tasks with your team too. If you're on fire, Any.do will offer coupons and promotions to keep you going.
· Google Keep: available for your desktop, tablet, Android and IOS platform, and via a Chrome browser extension. It's very simple to use, though it may seem lighter on some features than similar apps (some users prefer that). It has everything any to-do list needs and does integrate with other Google products. If you're a big Googler, give Google Keep a try.
· Todoist: the granddaddy to do list app, available on Android, iOS, Web, desktop for Windows and OSX, as well as add-ons and plug-ins for browsers and email apps. It's packed with features, though some of the most useful ones only come with a yearly subscription.
· Evernote: A classic for years, Evernote is feature packed and used by millions. This handy piece of software has a long list of features and makes sharing tasks and keeping track of your to-dos a breeze. There is a free option and larger packages to make it a "team thing."
· Wunderlist: a seriously versatile app compatible accessible on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android, Windows, Kindle Fire and the Web. It's packed with too many easy to use features to list here.
Each of the above-mentioned to-do list applications were briefly mentioned and tested, but many features weren't mentioned, so be sure to check them all out for a day or two to determine what option best fits your lifestyle and work habits. If it's a pen and paper, keeping it old school is "cool" with me.
The science is in: multitasking is a myth. Think You're Multi-Tasking? Think Again All we're really doing is switching rapidly from one task to another, with a cognitive cost to each switch. We feel like we're multitasking, because our brains serve up a little hit of dopamine (the reward hormone) each time we complete the smallest task, like sending an email. In reality, we've accomplished little, yet that dopamine hit trains our brains to keep up the multitasking cycle. It's also been shown to increase cortisol production (the stress hormone) and lower your effective IQ by as much as 15 points.
The biggest drivers? Email and texting. Each time you see that email message ghost in the corner of your screen, or hear that ding, it distracts you and you feel like it has to be dealt with immediately. Do yourself a favor: close out the email, silence your phone, and focus on one task at a time. You'll be more effective, reduce stress, and increase your IQ. What a deal and a nice piece of information too, don't get mad at me if you get passed up on your next job because you tell them you want to be more valuable and refute multi-tasking.
The reality that passwords are necessary is well-established at this point. So is the fact that it's a real hassle to keep track of all of them. Add marketing into the mix, and you've just upped the amount of passwords you need to remember. Experts say you need different passwords for everything, preferably 8 – 16 characters with a variety of uppercase and lowercase alphanumeric and special characters, to protect yourself from hackers gaining access to all of your accounts. Most hackers use software and have limited resources (if it takes too long to hack your email account, they will move on).
With so many passwords to remember, though, most of us ignore this advice. Don't leave it up to your browser or memory to remember all of your passwords. Get some help with handy dandy free software. Pay a small price if the software you like carries a small free. Trust me, I've seen it 100s of times and in some cases a password system that cost over $5,000 would have been worth it.
There are some tricks you can employ to make this process easier. Use a phrase only you know, replacing each word in the phrase with a letter or number. "I hate to fly but have to for work" becomes Ih2fbh24W and lets you into the site you use to book travel. It looks random, but it's easy to remember. To make it even stronger, replace letters with symbols or numbers that look similar, such as ! for I, a $ for S and a backwards 3 for an E. Make sure your recovery information is up-to-date to ensure you receive those "I forgot my password" emails or text messages. Also, don't forget to protect any mobile devices you use. There is an amazing amount of personal information on your phone, and I'm sure you want it protected. I just purchased Kaspersky Total Internet Protection and they offer protection for my mobile phone at no additional cost.
This should go without saying, but don't share your passwords with anyone, and don't write them down and place them in an easy-to-find spot. Most SAAS (software as a service) applications allow you to create an account for a user, which allows you to delete their account at anytime. You can use an online program like Lastpass, Zoho Valut (great for teams) and RoboForm to create and store your passwords, so you only need to remember one "Master Password" to access everything and many of these applications automatically input your information into website login boxes – it's amazing and safe. Just make sure that one "master password" password is foolproof (in other words "as difficult as it can get") and you've set up recovery options for those unfortunate times we forget the unforgettable.
On this note, be wary of emails asking you to log into your account; no matter how official the email looks, it's a phishing scam. I've yet to meet a company that asks for account information via email. If the email worries you enough, open your account in a different browser and ask their support department what's going on. Chances are you just outsmarted some guy phishing without a pole.
Taking these precautions will ensure that you have access to all of your marketing accounts in one easy place, and it will allow you to get your marketing team or person what they need immediately. As an agency, this is one of the biggest hurdles we have when we onboard clients. It's been two months, and our team is still waiting on several passwords for one client. They're a small business, so we understand, but make sure that you're the small/medium or large business that doesn't waste time gathering and resetting passwords when there's money on the line.
*If you want to help a company and the community out, report that fishing email to the company. It may just save several people heartache.
Executive Coach and author Richard Leider talks about the "Golden Hour," which is whatever time of day your thought processes are clearest and you're at your most creative. This isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather one you'll either discover about yourself, or you already know. Are you sharpest in the morning? Just after lunch? Right before bed? Whenever that time is for you, don't waste it, use it. Close your email, log off of social media, silence your phone, and focus on completing tasks that require your sharp, creative self to shine. Add your Golden Hour to your daily schedule, and respect that time commitment the same way you would if you were meeting with your biggest customer. Respecting that Golden Hour may just make your golden years a little better. If your golden hour happens to be your creative hour, use it for tackling marketing tasks; if not, use it to open up more time for marketing tasks.
The phrase, "you must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning," became a cliché for a reason: when your day starts out bad, it generally keeps going in that direction. Establishing a solid morning routine helps guard against days that start bad and remain bad.
It starts before you even leave the house. Beginning your day with just seven minutes of exercise has been proven to improve energy and focus for the entire day, so don't shortchange the power of seven minutes. Another proven fact: each bad decision we make negatively impacts the rest of the decisions we make that day, no matter how trivial it seems. Plan your breakfast menu and wardrobe weekly, so you arrive at the office – on time – with two fewer decisions under your belt.
Take five minutes after you arrive to organize your day and study your to do list. Don't begin with your email, which can and will derail all your plans. If you can knock off one big to do list item first thing, it'll inspire you to keep going. This is doubly true if your golden time is in the morning.
Before leaving work each day, prepare for tomorrow. Make sure your to do list is updated and has tomorrow's tasks outlined, which reinforces the sense you accomplished something today, pumping you up for tomorrow and making your off time more enjoyable. If the back of your mind is filled with unfinished business, making that switch from business to personal time is nearly impossible. Creating a roadmap for the next day helps you make that transition and many experts believe that breaking that to-do list into time periods increases productivity. Review tomorrow's schedule, tidy up your desk, answer those emails you let sit while you concentrated on more urgent tasks – the end of the day is the perfect time to handle these details that would have been a waste if handled earlier in the day. And a clean desk and updated to-do-list ensures you start fresh the following morning.
You have to enter an email address for nearly everything: online shopping, retail rewards programs, and newsletters just to name a few. The problem is that, once you're in, you're in forever and the emails never stop, clogging up your inbox and distracting you from the real work you need to get done. Just because you have to enter an email address, though, doesn't mean it needs to be your primary email. With so many free email services out there, setting up a "junk" email account is fast and easy. You can check it weekly to clean it out, or read the items you really do want to see. If it's already too late, and your current primary email address is overloaded with news updates and donation requests, create a new primary email account and let the old one keep collecting junk, just don't forget to let people know your address changed. If that's not possible, unsubscribe from emails that add worthless clutter and use software that helps clean inboxes. One popular service is unroll.me. It's a lifesaver, you set it up (quickly I'll add) to roll up emails from certain places or people that you know aren't urgent, and the service gives you the option to check your "roll ups" at anytime. You'll end up with a clean inbox…dare I say inbox zero?
Back to some more marketing related issues…Your domain name is the brick and mortar location for your online business, so keep it safe. Once you come up with the perfect name, make sure you get it purchased in your account under YOUR name. If this isn't something you feel comfortable doing, have your marketing team do it, but make sure it's done in your account and under your name. Do not ever, and I mean ever, let anyone have control of your domain name. A website and its files can come and go, but a domain name and the brand behind it are much harder to replace.
After you control your domain name, don't forget to set things up so that it automatically renews each year. I can't tell you how many clients' we've had lose domain names because they ignored emails and forgot to pay the small renewal fees. It's always a pain to get domain names back after their gone, and it always costs a bit more money. On top of that, we also recommend our clients purchase their domain names for extra years. It's a small (likely very small) ranking factor, but it shows search engines that you're dedicated and that your domain isn't a "throw away" domain. If you have extra funds, add an additional 5-years to the life of your domain name and live worry free. You can use anyone of your to-do-lists to remind you to add a few more years in a year or two.
It's not uncommon for some business owners to buy different variations of their domain name, so that the competition doesn't use those different variations to steal business. I mention it, because some professionals recommend buying the .co, .org, .info, .co.uk, .me, etc. but I personally don't think it's worth it. It's a waste of your money and efforts, two things you can spend in better places – building a brand. If you have a huge brand already, or are planning on building a huge brand in multiple countries and states, it may be something to consider.
Make better decisions and hone your competitive edge by remaining up-to-date in your industry. You'll learn about coming changes, improved technology, and develop expertise in your industry, all invaluable tools for building marketing success. With technology, it's easier than ever, but where should you start?
Begin online, reading at least one article about your industry every day. A quick web search reveals blogs about nearly any subject matter you can think of, and they're a great source of information. Flipboard is a phone app that lets you pick your interests and learns what you like to read overtime. You can also use social media like LinkedIn and Twitter, or set up Google Alerts to notify you every time Google indexes an article with search words you select. If you receive too many notifications, adjust your settings accordingly. These resources are an easy way to keep up with your industry, and easy to fit into your day. Read articles over meals or during your commute if you ride the bus or train, or listen to podcasts if you drive to work. If you make it a priority, you'll find the time. While doing this, keep an eye on your competition too. Google alerts can help you find out what the competition is doing and where they're showing up. If you spot a trend, it might be something you should try.
For a more personal, in-depth approach, you can also join trade organizations or attend networking events and conferences. You'll meet others in your industry, learn more about your competition, and build relationships with potential customers and suppliers. In terms of marketing and growing your business education and networking is an absolute must and a great way to stay on top of best productivity practices for business and marketing. If you're on the shy side or too busy to network, stick with education by reading books, magazines, articles and blog posts.
You already know that social media is a necessity for your marketing efforts (at least in most industries); though keeping up with all the different feeds may seem overwhelming. Additionally, if you're confining your updates to business hours, you're missing a big chunk of time people spend on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Luckily, there are a number of apps available to manage your various feeds and send scheduled updates, even when you're out of the office.
Applications like CrowdBooster combine social media and marketing analytics, allowing you to build deeper relationships and better prospects at the same time. TweetDeck and Tweepi help you navigate and clean up your Twitter, as well as schedule tweets. SocialOomph and IFTTT offer functions for a number of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Finally, Hootsuite, TweetDeck and Bufferapp allow you to schedule updates and publish across multiple social networks via a single dashboard, which allows you to schedule your updates for an entire week or month. If you dig deep into your Analytics on platforms like Facebook via their Insights tool, you can schedule updates when most of your users are online, making it easier to get maximum exposure. For more information: Facebook advertising guide for small businesses.
Online marketing in 2016, just like previous years, will involve numerous moving parts consisting of a constantly expanding list of online portals to track and interact with. This will include Analytics accounts, social profiles, web profiles, niche directory profiles, review portal profiles, platforms for tracking and analyzing performance, and so on. Overtime, you'll end up with hundreds of accounts and keeping tracking of everything is vital, especially if you want to stay ahead of the competition, maintain accuracy, and save time on your marketing efforts.
There are several ways to store this data, but we've found that an easy way is to create a simple excel/spreadsheet on OneDrive or Google Drive, and share it with experts and administrators involved in a particular client's marketing efforts. When you set things up, keep these documents online (1 standard online document = 1 always up-to-date document), so that any change(s) related to the administration of your accounts can be completed quickly, and everyone on the team has the details they need immediately. Make sure you set proper permissions when sharing these documents. Some permissions allow editing and others limit users to viewing only.
At Phoenix Online Media, we use tabs within each spreadsheet to organize our accounts by type e.g. Social Media Profiles, Software Platforms, Web Directories, Niche Directories and so on. Although thoroughly tracking all accounts and account credentials may seem unnecessary, or pointless – I can promise you that it's vital to your ongoing marketing efforts. Furthermore, I can guarantee you that it will save you money and make any transitions
Keeping track of this information has three (3) major upsides:
a) You know instantly what profiles you control and can quickly make next step decisions.
b) marketing team or internal company changes can be done efficiently
c) Any major change i.e. an address change, name change, partner change or image changes can be done quickly, because your organized approach to web marketing has given you the information you need to quickly access accounts and make changes.
Without this information, you'll spend hours resetting passwords and looking for profiles online that have outdated information. Do yourself a favor and setup a detailed road-map of your marketing efforts. Start as soon as possible, and reap the rewards as time goes on.
Every business has a host of necessary tasks that don't grow the business, even though the business will fail if they aren't completed. Though necessary, these tasks, usually administrative in nature, often don't happen often enough to require a full-time or permanent employee. Once again, technology provides a viable solution, in the form of virtual assistants.
In the past decade, a host of companies offering VA services opened their virtual doors online. For a variable fee, you can hire someone to clean up a spreadsheet, make airline reservations, pick up furniture, create a mailing list, pretty much anything you can think of that can be done online (and some in person, as well), there's an option for delegation. Costs start at a few dollars per task, with monthly plans available at most VA providers. Some of the more popular ones include taskrabbit.com, timesvr.com, and fancyhands.com. Most of these companies claim that their virtual assistants are from the states, so you can assure that writing tasks get done by someone with English as their primary language. From experience, I'll tell you that the more details you give the better results you'll get. So take the extra minute to describe what you need in more detail.
You have a lot on your plate, but you can keep your marketing strategy moving forward and safe by using these simple tools: plan your day to make the most effective use of your time and energy levels, keep yourself on track with updated to do lists and a good grasp of your industry, and make technology work for you. Implement these tools correctly and you'll feel energized, you'll get more done and you'll take more enjoyment in your work.
The post 11 Can't Miss Tips to Organize Your Business & Marketing appeared first on Phoenix Online Media.]]>
Financial advisers tell clients that small changes add up to big savings. That daily trip to Starbucks seems like a small indulgence, but over the course of a year you're spending hundreds of dollars. Multiply that by all of your other non-necessary expenses, and you're looking at thousands of dollars each year. This wisdom holds true in the small improvements you make to your website. A few percentage points in increased traffic here, another point there, and before you know it, your results may increase by a solid 20 percent. What's more, thanks to constantly evolving technology and tools, these incremental gains are easier than ever to achieve and prove.
Internet powerhouses like Amazon and Google already know this; they've built their brands on endless series of incremental gains. According to Amazon's Jeff Bezos, repeated testing of alternative layouts for Amazon's homepage ensures they find the perfect combination that maximizes sales. Each change may only make a small impact on its own, but aggregated over time the results are huge.
Over the next few weeks, I'll write in-depth about each of the ideas presented in this post. For now, this overview will get you on your way to increased site traffic, more conversions and an overall better user experience.
You want your site to convey an image of professionalism and reliability. If its pages have spelling and grammar errors, though, your site's visitors receive the opposite impression, and they likely won't return. Some people believe the average user doesn't notice these errors, but Success Works' Heather Lloyd-Martin, a 20-year SEO veteran, says that's a myth. Lloyd-Martin says your customers do notice, and "it makes your company look unprofessional, like you can't spell, and like you don't care." How can you get their order right if you can't get your own site right? Fixing these errors is quick, simple, and free, so there's no excuse for ignoring them.
Your site tells the story of your brand. Tell that story in your own voice, using a conversational, natural tone. The goal is to deliver your message in a way that reflects how you'd convey that same information in a person-to-person interaction. Know your audience and adjust your tone accordingly. A site selling medical equipment has a different audience than an entertainment blog, and therefore different audience expectations. Keep your reader in mind when telling your story.
Hold off on Keyword Stuffing, It's Just Old-School
In line with adopting a conversational tone on your site is abandoning keyword stuffing, which makes your message unnatural instead of your brand's story and tone. Not only does keyword stuffing negatively affect your site's readability, it can easily steer readers from your website. Search engines will notice if you engage in this practice and they'll penalize you for it. You don't have to lose the keywords altogether. Rather, focus them where they'll have the biggest impact: title, headers, and in the first paragraph. Keep your keyword density low and remember to replace some occurrences with synonyms.
Effective and Correctly Constructed URLs Make a Difference
The perfect URL structure is simple, straightforward, and meaningful. Construct your URLs logically, with an eye toward readability. According to Google, this means using words rather than strings of product numbers, not adding underscores to separate the words in a URL, and avoiding overly complex URLs with special characters etc. Potential site visitors scroll through a long series of search result returns, so make sure your URLs stand out by being easy to read and letting the reader know at a glance that your page will give them the information they're looking for. Google also advises avoiding word repetition in your URLs, as this may cause users to assume the site is spammy and it doesn't look good – don't believe us, find out for yourself. Using keywords in your URLs is okay, but don't overdue it and above all else, try to make your URLs short. Short URLs win.
Yes, it's nearly 2016 & yes, there are still websites that do not serve mobile and tablet users. Strange, right?
Responsive web design ensures your site looks good no matter what device the user chooses, from desktops to tablets to cell phones. This technology responds to the reader, automatically adjusting to fit not only the correct screen size, but also when the user switches from portrait to landscape view. Using CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, ZURB, CSS boilerplate and other coding options, responsive web design not only re-sizes and re-formats content, but also hides or moves content as needed, ensuring readability and a positive user experience. Employing this technology also removes the need to redesign your site each time a new device hits the market. I am literally shocked that companies do not have responsive websites. I know, you're busy, but it's been 6 years coming and more than 50% of your users use non-desktop devices. Furthermore, Google actually punishes you by not showing your website in search results when users use devices that your website doesn't accommodate. I can't blame them, they want every user to have a great experience and in my opinion they're doing you a favor. In fact, if I were you, I'd find out a way to contact Google and thank them for helping you out. An email would do, but a card may be a little nicer.
Fixing crawl errors positively impacts user experience and makes the major search engines trust your website more. According to YouMoz, it also helps your rankings when you redirect crawl errors to a good URL, so you aren't missing traffic from other sites. Free accounts like Google Webmasters and Bing Webmasters make this process an easy and inexpensive fix (if you can do the fixes yourself), even though it may look daunting when you see the number of impacted links. Luckily, the aforementioned search engine tools offer tricks and easy ways to fix them. If you're looking for a paid option Moz.com has excellent tools. I'm not recommending you fix crawl errors to simply appease search engines. I'm recommending that you fix issues because you could lose valuable links. Example: Mike built a list of amazing resources and one day Mike decides to check on that list of Amazing resources to ensure his users are still getting "Amazing Resources," well if you haven't taken the time to fix your crawl errors, Mike may discover that your page is now a 404 error page. This would lose you a valuable link and it may be a link on an amazing site – maybe a government site, maybe a strong education website, or maybe Mike just has an authority domain. Either way, you lost a great link and getting that link back, may not be possible. I am also recommending that you fix crawl errors to provide users with a better website experience. Take care of your site and search engines will take care of you. Deal?
Once upon a time, a group of competitors got together to create a product to make life better for all of their customers. Even without the "once upon a time," that sounds like a fairy tale. Competitors don't work together that way. Coke and Pepsi never teamed up to make a soft drink everyone likes. But Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Yandex worked together to create microdata available to the public at schema.org, to make life easier for webmasters, developers, search engines (see it wasn't just for users) and end users. That should make the power of microdata clear, but the practice has yet to take root in most of the SEO world, and that's pretty unfortunate. We typically find the "best" SEO companies completely ignoring microdata. By applying the right schema or microdata markup to certain aspects of a page, you're giving search engines, and therefore potential readers, vital information they need about your site, which may improve your search engine ranking positions – especially over sites without microdata. Schema, microdata – whatever you call it gives search engines metadata above and beyond what used to be available which can greatly improve a much better browsing experience for users. Take away tip – look into and use microdata.
Location, Location, Location: Winning the Local Optimization Game
Up your local SEO efforts immediately with brand citations, onsite optimization (locally geared), reviews, business signals and local business directory profiles. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google and Bing search for this information and return relevant results to users based on data such as your NAP (name, address, and phone number) and business signals e.g. categories, reviews and the proximity of your business to the searcher. Obviously, this information needs to be correct on your own site (schema wouldn't hurt on your own site either), but you also need to make sure it's correct on other sites, such as Yelp, Facebook, Google Places, Bing Places and several other local business directories. I like to think that doctors and lawyers have it easy, because they have a plethora of industry-specific websites that they can use to up their local optimization game. According to Moz, nearly 40% of local SEO success depends on website signals e.g. NAP, categorization, page titles etc… and business directory information including citation volume and NAP information. Read the page linked above, there's a wealth of information that you can use to dominate your local market. And if you get nothing out of this entire paragraph – remember this – get reviews. Reviews matter, they matter in more ways than you can imagine. Develop a review earning strategy and work at it daily for years. Trust me, online reputation matters, and more users than you'd ever imagine trust reviews online more than reviews from friends and family.
An SSL Certificate creates a secure connection between a browser and a server by encrypting the data sent from a website to a server. Commonly used on pages where sensitive information is exchanged, such as passwords and payment data, this security feature is vital to ensure visitors trust your site. Luckily, it's easily discernible thanks to visual indicators such as the padlock icon and green address bar, so trust between you and your customers is quickly established. Trust is huge, which is why it was mentioned first. However, since August 6, 2014, Google announced that an SSL certificate could help your search engine rankings. They did say that it's not a "huge boost," but this entire post is about the little things that add up to big results. Trust and higher rankings means that an SSL certificate is essential. Don't worry if you're lost, contact us today. We'll get you what you need and get everything setup for you, so that your customers feel safer on your site, and so that Google feels safer about sending customers to your site.
Closely related to the time spent on site metric, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors your site receives who navigate away after viewing a different page. This is kinda misleading, and you can read about it more here, but the short of it is-is that if a user does something on the page that's considered a "hit," and they leave the page without visiting another page, then they officially did not "bounce," The Bounce rate essentially tells you how effectively your content resonates with visitors and matches what they're looking to find. If it's high, that means you aren't communicating your message well, or you're attracting bad visitors. Contributing factors include design and usability issues, incorrect implementation of your tracking code (small chance but maybe), and visitors who got the information they needed off that one page. Answer websites typically see very high bounce rates, because visitors go, find the answer, and leave. To lower your bounce rate, make sure you tell your content is quality and matches what users would expect to see on the page. Make sure your story engages users on your landing page, deliver on expectations, employ clear site navigation and responsive design, and be proactive on social media. Test different landing pages to see which ones perform the best, but make sure you collect enough data on your landing pages to make an informed decision. We believe that depending on the type of site you operate, Bounce rates can affect rankings.
You may be able to lure in readers with catchy, intriguing titles, but without engaging content, you'll never get that reader to take the most important next steps: returning for more and/or sharing your story with others via social media. To continue driving traffic to your site, you must get readers to take these steps. Jeff Bezos has been quoted many times as saying Amazon relied almost solely on word of mouth to build awareness of their site, so do not underestimate the collective power of satisfied customers. Add in the famous Panda update Google implemented back in 2011 (followed by similar moves on other search engines), and keywords alone are no longer enough to drive growth. You must deliver the goods, and do so consistently with engaging, original content and high quality content. If you're writing about something, find 5 similar articles, maybe 6, and before you publish your article on the same topic, make sure it's the best article of the bunch. Use the other articles as resources and cite them for their work, but make sure your article tops the list. Throwing together articles with decent content is a tired and old game. To win in this content game, you need top-notch content regularly.
By this point, we're all in agreement that keyword stuffing is out, and top-notch content is in. How do you achieve this top tier status? If you listen to Google's Matt Cutts, you'll become an authority in your niche. This links strongly (no pun intended) to a previous entry, delivering engaging content. Thought leaders are recognized authorities within their own field. It seems daunting, but you can achieve this position by posting insightful, engaging blogs, articles, and white papers. The reward? Brand recognition, improved SEO, speaking event invitations, and repeat traffic. Ah, I almost forgot, links and social signals that will endlessly help you kill it online. Study up, write a lot and put yourself out there for criticism. Check this link out for a bit more information on though leadership and how to become one.
Employing the above tactics should generate increases in traffic and help out with your search engine rankings. Even if each change returns only a small improvement, over time and combined together, those small gains will help you reap big rewards, driving more traffic to your site and steadily improving your goals. In the end, they'll help you pull ahead of the competition and win the web game.
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It's tempting to think the old ways are good enough, and I'll be the first to admit that leaving the "comfort zone" is difficult, but leading and winning almost always requires change. If you don't do today what your competitors are doing, you may have ample reason to regret it in the future, and in business – regret usually means lost revenue. I'm not saying that everything old should be tossed aside, I'm simply suggesting that as a responsible professional, you owe it to yourself, your team or your employer to know what deserves attention and exploration.
Here is a look at a few of the best places to spend your marketing resources in the coming year. These suggestions should help you find new customers, retain current customers, and earn more revenue from both. Before I go any further – YES – many of these things should have been looked at years ago, but let's not worry about the past and look towards the future with great enthusiasm.
A responsive website is one of those things you've should've done a few years ago!
Smartphones and tablets will continue to dominate, and wearables are gaining in popularity. In fact, in 2015 Google stated that 10 countries, including the U.S., had more traffic from mobile devices than from desktop devices. That's what brought on Mobilegeddon, the massive algorithm update that sent unresponsive websites to a place where mobile users can't find them. This update alone has cost some businesses millions of dollars, and there's no indication that this update will change, so it's important that every business recognizes this and adapts to it. For years, websites and company profiles have been the first thing a consumer sees when looking into products, services and businesses. It's important that a business's website makes a good impression and that their online profiles are well maintained.
Don't get me wrong, desktop traffic is still important, but if your website isn't responsive, you need to start working towards getting it responsive now – doing anything less is irresponsible. Every consumer and search engine expects a mobile friendly website, especially when there is software available that can make almost every site somewhat mobile friendly in minutes. Use the software now, and get started on a long-term viable solution later today (or tomorrow if it's late). Trust me, it's not that hard (for most businesses) and it truly is worth the investment. Here's some data for you to consider if you're still not convinced that a responsive website is vital to the long-term success of almost every business – A recent poll conducted with Millennials concluded that 87% of them stated that their smartphone is always at hand day and night.
A responsive website is user-friendly regardless of the device you're using. I have clients (our team didn't build their website) that can see their website on a mobile device, so they assume it's "responsive." Unfortunately, that's not the case. A responsive website means that your pages are easy to navigate, information is simple to find, purchasing a product or service is easy, and contacting you is something that can be done in a click. Consumes should not have to zoom in and out while viewing your website.
Using mobile devices to search for information is driving the importance of local SEO marketing efforts. From Search Engine Land, "Local Searches Lead 50% of Mobile Visitors to Visit Stores Within One Day" (source – this article contains a great deal of relevant information) – this fact alone makes a strong argument that every business with an address (not a PO Box) should be focusing on local SEO and map optimization on major search engines. There's quite a bit that goes into Local SEO, but a great start is claiming business profiles on major search engines and major social platforms and completing profiles as much as possible. These profiles may also be the first impression a consumer has of your business, so make sure they look professional and contain accurate information. Name, Address & Phone Number (NAP) information is believed to be the most important information within these profiles, but don't overlook proper categorization, a business description, pictures, links to your website and other criteria.
Local SEO provides results based on where the searcher is currently located. She/He can search anywhere, whenever they need the information. That could be at their job, out running errands or at home. Google recently announced that more than 50% of their 100 billion searches each month occur on mobile devices.
The best and most important thing to remember regarding local SEO is that in many industries or areas of the country, the market is literally untapped. It's probably because the work is very tedious, very time consuming and often confusing depending on the platform. On top of all that, it's relatively new to the "general public" – traditional SEO is still seen by many organizations as an illegitimate source of business revenue. Take my advice, do a bit a research to determine if your industry or market area is neglecting the many benefits of local optimization, and if they are, as the old saying goes, the first to market usually wins – so be the first.
Reviews are ubiquitous online, from Yelp and Amazon to Angie's List and TripAdvisor. To make decisions about whether or not to buy your product or service, consumers rely on what other people are saying about you. Surprisingly, there are millions of businesses that do not have a review generation strategy. Think of it from a referral point of view, or from a comparison point of view. If your company is up against another and pricing or service offerings are similar, reviews will be the deciding factor. People do read reviews, if you think they don't, your wrong, and if you say you don't, you're probably not being truthful.
Reviews and review sites can be a boon to your business if you stay on top of a review generation system. To keep your establishment healthy and prospering, you need to know what individuals are saying about you. Deal promptly with negative reviews and turn them into a positive – make the situation right and use the opportunity to put a face to your business and prove that you care about each of your customers. Every business will eventually get a negative review, it's part of business, if you're actively earning positive reviews, that one negative review will only make your positive reviews seem genuine and depending on your response, it may actually help you win new business. Just make sure any response comes from an authority figure within your organization.
There are several review platforms online. Ensure you balance your efforts, so that when someone looks for your business online, they see an entire page of reviews that accurately reflect your team's hard-work and devotion. I try to stay away from platforms that don't have review filters in place to help ensure reviews are genuine. Most search engines and consumers distrust these services. Spend your time on Google +, Yelp, Bing, Avvo, HealthGrades etc… Platforms that matter and that take price in ensuring the reviews they display have merit.
Reputation management is so important that you can't simply watch as it unfolds. Reputation management is not only about review generation. It's about promoting positive things happening in your organization. There are a multitude of platforms available to promote different aspects of your business from new products to outstanding employees. Hire a reputation management professional, or take the time to build profiles about you and your company. Ensure these profiles have true and positive information about your products, services and achievements. Take the time to fill out these profiles completely and link to them from other profiles. A proactive stance keeps you aware and in control. Set up ways to monitor your business online with software or free services like Google Alerts. Establish a system to scan reviews often and respond to good and bad reviews. Give your business a face, trust me, it will be worth your time and may save your company if something bad actually does happen. One quick tip – try to use platforms that you can control. Don't ignore platforms you can't control, but don't get caught using platforms to manage your reputation that you do not control.
Over the last three years, a large number of new small social media sites have burst onto the scene. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn, are some of the larger social platforms that most businesses use. In 2016, these sites will continue to flourish, and more and more users will use them for information.
For your business, find where your prospects gather, and focus your efforts there. Limit yourself to platforms you'll be able to manage and manage well. Do not create an account, just to create an account. Nothing looks worse for a business than a neglected profile. Social media is all about building relationships with your customers and prospects. The more direct and human you come across, the more they trust you and stay loyal. We often tell clients with limited resources to focus on one platform. It's better to be great at something than horrible at several things.
By devoting your time and efforts to just a few social media platforms, you can maximize these relationships. You don't have more credibility, or sales, just because you have hundreds of thousands of so-so followers. What's important is connecting with people who are actually interested in your product and will buy from you. These are the ones that reach out to friends, share your message and brand, and boost your revenue. Remember, be social, no-one likes the guy that talks about himself all day. Share great resources, local events, funny images (if appropriate) and personal messages. Here's another tip – stay far away from services offering 10,000 fans for X amount of dollars. It's a waste of money, and may end up making you look bad.
Make your company and product easy to spot by sending out a consistent message over all your platforms. Not the exact same message, but the same tone, and similar messages. Use the same colors, logos, typefaces and formats. People online scan sites for mere seconds. When your brand is the same everywhere, you are easy to spot and more important than anything else, you are easy to remember.
Think Dropbox, with its simple blue box, Wells Fargo with its team of six horses, the panda graphic that announces the World Wildlife Fund and ZenDesk's happy Buddha. The eye of the consumer is drawn to these graphics because they are used by theses organizations consistently, and everywhere. The color and style stays the same. The messages stay the same. The goal is to be remembered, if a consumer can recall your brand during a conversation, you've won the branding game.
The internet will be getting busier in 2016. Each year there is more noise and more competition, making it harder and harder for you to get found. Make it easier for your tribe to spot you by choosing a noticeable brand, and sticking with it online and in print (if you must). Get started today, so that you're ahead or not too far behind. A great strategy can do wonders in catching up.
Giving your prospects useful information that is helpful, entertaining and easy to find will be even more essential in 2016. It builds trust and gives value and authority to your brand. This is what gets and keeps people buying from you.
It also gets the attention of the search engines, especially when you combine useful words with eye-catching graphics like photos, infographics and video. The more professional and diverse you are with your information and images, the more likely it is that visitors will dwell on your page. This dwelling factor continues to take on more importance as an overall marketing strategy. Content isn't just articles, it's media in general. Media is king and it's going to stay that way, the only thing that will change is what type of media is king. And in different industries, different media is king. Know your industry and know what your consumers enjoy.
Be aware that your target market will keep growing more sophisticated in how to best use search queries. Expect shoppers to enter longer, more complex keywords in 2016 as the speech recognition software available on smartphones gets more technologically advanced.
This means keyword density continues its downward slide in importance. What's taking its place it how relevant your content is and how useful it is. Go for quality and topicality in your content. Search engines are smart, they know that attorney is the same as lawyer and that bad is the same as terrible. Keep your content useful above all else, and share it appropriately. Optimize everything. Don't be spammy, but optimize it and do it well. There are several ways to optimize content. Content optimization is just as important as the content itself.
Making the most of current SEO best practices will always work to your advantage. With high quality content, you are making it simple for the right shopper to find your product and service, and you will establish yourself as the authority in your market and industry. You don't have to try to sell them or convince them. Instead, the quality of the words, images and videos on your platforms will give you authority, which in turn convinces visitors that you are the business or individual to do business with – especially if you're an all-star in all the aforementioned topics.
Believe it or not, Google officially likes secure sites and although I suspect it's a small ranking factor, they say it is. Get an SSL certificate for your website. Not only will it help with rankings a tad, but it will also help consumers fell safer while on your site. Security is huge and as a responsible webmaster you should make every attempt to protect any and all of your visitor's data. There's something about that green bar that makes consumers feel warm and fuzzy. We've always thought they were a great idea, and we've always recommended that any eCommerce site should have one. Don't just secure your checkout pages or your contact pages. Secure your entire site. Most sites today have contact forms on every page (and rightfully so), so keep things as safe as possible and earn more trust with search engines. Invest in an SSL certificate.
Speed matters too – a lot. Your site should load in seconds. Google loves quick sites, we love quick sites and consumers love quick sites. There is a lot that goes into making your site fast. I won't go into everything, but I will say that we can help you get your site quick, and so can any legitimate development company. Use Google's PageSpeed Insights to see where you are today, and contact us our someone else if you're interested in speeding things up. It will help with conversions, bounce rate, ranking and all that means revenue. Do the world a favor and get your site quick today. One last quick tip – don't skimp on hosting, there are a variety of reasons why you shouldn't skimp on hosting, which I hope to cover one-day, but when it comes to speed – cheap hosting usually equals slow load times.
2016 is shaping up as an excellent year for businesses that take a proactive approach to online marketing. Make an effort to stay on-top of trends, or pay someone to do it for you. Keep your old ways if you must – especially if they truly do work better, but please consider investing in your online presence.
(in no particular order, except mobile, come on people)
Good luck and if you're looking for a report on where your business stands now request one here. We also have an affordable Digital Marketing Program that covers everything mentioned in this article.
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Local SEO can be part of traditional search engine optimization, but the goal of local SEO is to rank higher for geographic location related search queries. In General, It is the process of optimizing a website and other online properties for geographically related searches. Local optimization is supposed to help a business show up for users intending on finding local products or services in a certain area.
If you're a local business – Yes. Local search engine optimization is becoming increasingly more important for local businesses. Without proper optimization, a local business may not be found online, and will certainly lose revenue. Over the past few years the number of mobile users has increased significantly making it more important for businesses to show up for local search queries.
Perhaps the best part of local optimization, is the cost. If you know what you're doing, have several hours to commit, a long-list of local business directories, and consistently build reviews, you can earn higher local rankings on your own. Because the goal is to rank for local less competitive terms, after hours of learning, you may be able to rank your website for local terms. In most cases however, a business owner or marketing manager's time is better spent on other activities.
There are a long-list of things that can help a business rank higher on search engines, but most experts agree that – reviews, consistently accurate name, address, and phone number (NAP) information, social signals, user behavior on your website, creating and claiming profiles on several directories, on-site factors, and back links from local sources are among the most important.
Your domain's authority
Links pointing back to your website
Your website's security (SSL Certificate)
Mobile friendliness
Social Platforms for each business location
Optimized social platforms
Try to include the target city in page titles defined
Brand citations (mentions online of your business)
Local Search Ranking Factors 2014 (moz.com)
Local SEO: How to Rank Your Local Business (searchengineland.com – Local SEO Factors )
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Reputation management generally refers to online reputation, and is the process of controlling an individual or organization's reputation online. In most cases, reputation management focuses on controlling a search engine's search results. In general, the process usually involves promoting web pages that have positive or neutral information about an individual or organization and "demoting" or pushing down the ranking position of web pages that have negative information about an individual or organization. By pushing web pages down (on search results pages) that reveal negative information about an individual or organization, the web page is harder to find and fewer people will find it.
In my opinion, reputation management is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued services (for lack of a better word) utilized by organizations and individuals that need a good reputation to earn new business. The process of monitoring and managing an online identity/brand has a long list of benefits. Unfortunately, for many businesses and individuals they wait to begin a reputation management campaign until after a major event occurs that may have negative ramifications. The problem with this is that after it's happened, a successful reputation management campaign is crucial for the continued success of that person or organization, and successful quick result orientated reputation management campaigns are more costly.
Of the 75% of U.S. adults who Google themselves, nearly half say the results aren't positive.
For many, reputation management is thought of in terms of "fixing" or "attempting to remove" negative online attention. It's something management or individuals do after something bad like a negative review happens. This is an okay strategy, but it's far from the best, and it's always substantially more expensive and risky. Reputation management is misunderstood because it's not something that should be done – after the fact – it's something that should be done all of the time. It's not only about fixing a wrong, there's more value in using it to promote greatness. As a final point, reputation management is not only for large organizations, small businesses and high profile individuals – it's a good thing for almost everyone for a variety of reasons e.g. an eventual job hunt, an eventual career in politics, a dream promotion, or even a board position in your home owner's association.
Because it's misunderstood and usually used to fix wrongs, reputation management is basically ignored. Organizations and individuals find no value in what their online reputation looks like until it's too late, and because of this, they pay little to no attention to it. If you think a segment of the population buys products and services without looking into a company or organization, you're 100% right. That said, I guarantee that a larger segment (greater than 80%) of the population looks into an organization or service provider before deciding to make a purchase decision. As technology gets better, and young adults and kids grow up, that segment will only increase. Reputation is undervalued, because in most cases, it's not used to make an organization or individual look great all the time. Because it's typically used to hide negative attention, individuals and organizations completely overlook the value in improving your online reputation – your "virtual doorway" – the profiles, review sites, your website etc… that are often a first impression of you or your organization. Enhancing these key platforms will make an organization or individual's reputation look stellar and in turn convert more researchers.
Have you looked into yourself or your organization online lately, and if you have, did you take the time to look at how you look compared to your competition?
First, every organization and individual is different. Rap stars are going to need a different strategy than Coca Cola, and a real estate agent will have a different strategy than a lawyer. Second, don't do things just to do things. What does that mean you ask? Don't create a Twitter account if you're going to set it up and forget it. Unused abandoned profiles can actually make it look like you either stopped doing business or don't have "your ducks in a row." Third, find out why reviews matter, and always work towards earning them. Focus on building your reputation around things you care about, can stay active in, and are relevant to your organization or career. If you do not think you have time to stay active on social platforms, search for profiles on platforms that do not need attention – there are hundreds of them. You can make your reputation look amazing online by having nice looking profiles on multiple platforms and display testimonials or accomplishments on those platforms. Feel free to ask me about software available that makes managing multiple platforms easy and what it takes to get an effective strategy started.
There are a few things every organization and individual can do to ensure they always look good for whatever their "target market" may be. Everyone, I don't care who you are, should be on LinkedIn, Google, Yelp and Facebook. When I say "be on" that doesn't mean create an account and leave it as is. That means complete your profile as much as possible. Make sure it has correct information, accurate contact details and that the about us/you portions of each site are completed (unique about you/us descriptions are best!). Take the time to tell people about things you're good at, things you like, your other websites, websites you enjoy, and things you are interested in. Additionally, if you're an organization, look for ways to win awards, and use press release distribution websites to talk about newsworthy things that occur within your organization – do not issue a press release for the sake of issuing a press release.
Take a few minutes each week to update your Facebook page with information that people may find interesting and valuable. And please, I beg of you, don't only talk about yourself and/or your organization. Outside of those four platforms, you should try to create no less than 10 – 20 more profiles on platforms you are interested in and can keep updated. Relevancy matters, so find platforms related to your industry, and popular websites will help you get better results. If you're a lawyer, there's no reason to create a profile on activerain.com (a real estate agent portal), and if you're a photographer, there's probably no reason to create a profile on github.com (a revision control hub for source code).
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Why Do I Need a Landing Page?
According to the Associated Press, you have just eight seconds to get a person's attention, and this figure is dropping in today's crowded media landscape. A landing page is a means of grabbing a visitor's attention through the use of compelling headlines, content, visuals, and calls to action. It is a webpage that appears once a visitor has clicked on an inbound link or ad and should be the most specific page you create.
Successful marketers have a landing page for every single campaign they run, and a HubSpot Marketing Benchmarks Report spelled out precisely why this is the case: Companies that increased the number of landing pages they use from 10 to 15 enjoyed a 55 percent increase in leads.
In this guide, we outline 15 different ways to create an optimized landing page that ensures your products and services are compelling and that establishes your organization as an authority in its niche.
When it comes to mobile landing pages, you really need to be at the top of your game because mobile consumers are even less patient than those purchasing from desktops. Yet it is well worth the effort, given the explosion in mobile shopping:
Despite the extraordinary growth of mobile commerce, a large percentage of marketers still haven't developed strategies to improve overall user experience. The size of your potential audience is absolutely huge, so use these tips to ensure your landing page is mobile-friendly:
2. Get to the Point
While the average attention span is around eight seconds, successful marketers typically adhere to the five-second rule, which means you have to attract and draw in visitors during this limited time period. Fail to offer something compelling, and visitors will leave your landing page and probably end up on the pages of your rivals!
The simplest way to do this is by creating a killer headline that encapsulates what you're offering and what the customer wants. A good headline immediately catches the eye and gets people to investigate the rest of your landing page. Try and place your main keyword in the headline and use it to spell out the benefits of your product or service.
Once you have captured their attention, the rest of the landing page should consist of short, snappy bullet points and text broken up into small paragraphs. This is known as scannable content and takes advantage of the fact that most people scan instead of actually reading. Within a couple hundred words, visitors should know what your brand stands for, what you're offering, and how it can help them. Do it right and they should be ready to hit the call-to-action button.
3. Embrace Simplicity
As we mentioned above, a landing page's conversion rate depends on capturing the attention of the audience in an allotted timeframe. However, keeping the audience's attention is just as important, and the best way to do this is by keeping it simple and sticking to one message.
Too many marketers allow their landing page to dissipate into a circus act with divergent messages and all sorts of visuals and videos cluttering up the page. As you will see later, all of these things are important, but the whole point of a landing page is to ensure visitors can digest what you're offering quickly and easily.
By removing this clutter, you make the goal more obvious and visitors are instantly drawn to what you want them to focus on. The attention ratio is the proportion of things you can click on to the number of goals. Since you should only have one goal, having several things a visitor can click on is bad news.
A test carried out by Unbounce showed a conversion rate increase of 40 percent when the attention ratio was changed from 6:1 to 1:1. In other words, there should be one clear message, one obvious goal, and one link for customers to click on.
4. Have Several Calls-to-Action
Where do you place your CTA button? Most marketers place it right at the end, after the content they believe makes the visitor ready to buy. Others put it at the very top in the belief that immediate exposure will cause visitors to click. In the end, there is no right answer, as some people click on the first link they see, while others like to wait and see if the content makes it worth clicking at the end.
The simple solution is to have multiple CTAs dotted throughout the landing page, because the old CTA-must-be-above-the-fold notion is something of a myth. In reality, higher landing page conversion rates have little to do with whether the button is above the fold and everything to do with whether the button comes after excellent copy.
Ultimately, it is all about the level of motivation a visitor has when they come to a CTA button. If what you are offering is deemed to be desirable by visitors when they come to the CTA, then they will click regardless of where it is located. With multiple CTAs, you cover everyone from impulse buyers to those who need a little bit more convincing.
According to Google, "Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page)."
The bounce rate is a great way to determine whether your landing page is hitting the right spot. Set up Google Analytics to measure your bounce rate; you'll probably find it is at least 40 percent and possibly a lot higher. Remember, the bounce rate measures the percentage of people who leave a page without further navigation.
Since a landing page is a one-off piece of content, a high bounce rate indicates that people simply aren't interested in what you have to offer. This could mean you have a poorly designed landing page, you're attracting the wrong audience, or your product/service has little demand. If your landing page is poorly designed or attracting the wrong audience, there are a few simple ways to change things and lower your bounce rate:
6. Include Testimonials
Testimonials are a fantastic way to create trust (which we discuss in greater detail later on) and a great strategy to reduce the barriers to a sale. Of course, it is crucial for you to resist the temptation to simply make some up. It is common for marketers to make the mistake of inventing obviously fake testimonials, complete with stock photo site images. This is a great way to completely shred your credibility.
If you have a fantastic product and excellent customer service, authentic testimonials will come flooding in. Even if they don't, you will have established a good enough relationship with customers to ask for testimonials. You are likely to be rewarded with a great personal story that really transforms the way visitors perceive your brand and see your landing page message.
You should be looking to increase the feedback mechanisms on your company website to allow people to comment on your services. It is virtually impossible to write copy better than your customers can because they use genuine emotion to create their content, and this really resonates with their fellow consumers.
7. Testing
You can spend countless man hours perfecting your landing page design and copy, but the only way to know if it is successful is through rigorous testing. Forget about gut instinct and start looking for cold, hard data to let you know what works and what doesn't. Basic A/B testing is the best way to start, as it allows you to compare different aspects of your campaign side by side to see which one converts better.
Here is a quick overview of what to test on your landing page:
A more advanced method of testing is multivariate testing (MVT), which involves sending a lot more traffic than A/B testing before you get accurate results. You need to test for changes in several variables at once while focusing on a scientific interpretation of the results. If you get MVT down pat, it could be a real breakthrough in how you create landing pages.
Online marketing is filled with scams and get-rich-quick schemes, so the informed modern consumer is wary of every landing page they arrive at. If you want to see an increase in your landing page conversion rate, you need to establish trust and credibility first, and we offer a few helpful tips below.
A large percentage of landing pages provide interested parties with something free in return for their personal details. This is usually something like a free e-book download or email newsletter. However, not everyone is keen to give away their email address, phone number, etc., for fear of spam and being placed on a telemarketing call list.
A good tactic is to provide them with something that is genuinely free in advance. If you are offering an e-book, for example, a simple solution is to offer the first chapter or two to see if they are interested in reading more. As well as piquing your visitor's interest, you are showing them that you're not just going to provide them with something worthless in exchange for their personal information. This try-before-you-buy tactic works fantastically well and removes yet another barrier to conversion.
It should be noted that incentivizing visitors with freebies and calls for urgency can have a positive short-term effect, but in the long run, you are likely to be sacrificing lead quality. You will simply end up with people interested in the freebies and not what you're offering for sale because, let's face it, free stuff is always welcome in a world where everything appears to have a price!
10. Brand Consistency
For better conversion, your banner, landing page, and destination site should all be similar in terms of design and color scheme. Successful marketers have found that context matching, the act of matching the style and content of the information first encountered by a visitor (a blog post, email, or ad, for example) with the landing page they click to, boosts their conversion rates.
This is called "maintaining the scent" by professional speaker Bryan Eisenberg and it ensures your visitor gains a familiarity with your brand. This means matching the design of the initial ad with that of the landing page and, finally, your website. It is also important to match the ad's headline with that of the landing page.
The landing page design should be similar to your website design, and color continuity is critical. Imagine walking into a McDonalds restaurant only to find it decorated in purple! You would immediately feel uneasy; this is what happens when prospects go from a black and yellow website to a green and white landing page. Moving from an ad or your website to your landing page should feel like a natural progression and reassure visitors that they are dealing with the same brand.
Noticeably different designs and colors distract visitors long enough to cause them to leave the page instead of clicking on the CTA button.
11. Add a Logo
One reason why companies don't bother creating a logo is the belief that it's an expensive process. Tell that to Nike or Twitter, as they paid $35 and $15, respectively, for now-world-famous logos that are immediately associated with their brands. The importance of logos is underscored by the fact that 100% of children age eight and above can correctly match a logo with its product. In other words, logos are crucial and create immense value.
If you already have a company logo, why isn't it on your landing page? This is especially important if you create a large number of landing pages for different products. Your logo makes your brand recognizable, and this leads to trust. When visitors arrive on your landing page and see the corporate logo, they immediately know the page belongs to a reputable brand, which means they are more likely to stay and read.
12. Pay Attention to Your Title and Meta Description Tags
A title tag is used to make a first impression on a search engine spider that only reads the first 70 characters. In reality, the landing pages with the best conversion rates don't go beyond 65 characters. As a consequence, your title tag needs to be brief and to the point, but it must also contain your main keyword.
The meta description tag is sometimes described as the signboard for search engines and is normally shown underneath the title and above the URL of a website in search results. Creating the right meta data is also an exercise in being concise, as you don't want to exceed 150 characters in your description; again, your main keyword should be included in a compelling statement that encourages one to click through. While the meta title tag is often written to improve a page's search engine ranking, both the title the description should be written for the human reader, but keep in mind that both tags are essential for an improved SEO ranking.
Although you have to be careful not to distract visitors too much, your conversion rate will dip if there is a lack of high-quality images on your landing page. The modern consumer doesn't like seeing large blocks of text, so it is necessary to add a little life to your landing page through images or even videos. Cleverly chosen images are excellent at creating an emotional response, which will in turn increase your conversion rate.
When choosing images for your landing page, ensure they do the following:
Here are some basic ideas for a landing page image:
14. Add a Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
When visitors arrive on your landing page, they should almost immediately be able to determine what your UVP is. You have hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors, so you have to clearly show why you stand out from the rest. The UVP can be specific to the product or service you sell, a statistic that shows how successful your business has been in relation to helping people, or the promotion on offer.
Don't confuse your CTA with your UVP! The UVP is the main selling point on the landing page while the CTA is responsible for turning a visitor's interest into the action you want. Here are a few common UVP formulas:
15. Add a Postscript (P.S.) and Look Beyond the Initial Conversion
Apart from your headline, the postscript is arguably the most important aspect of your landing page. This is the area where you'll get most of your conversions, so it needs to be absolutely fantastic and compelling. In this section, you should restate your offer and provide an extra incentive for visitors to accept. Here are a few things to consider adding after the final CTA:
Your work is not completed once the visitor clicks, however. Once you get a conversion, you should leverage the opportunity to ask new leads for another conversion. After a visitor clicks on your CTA, ask them to share on social media websites, such as Twitter and Facebook, or get them to subscribe to your company's newsletter.
When you have visitors who are already engaged, it is easier to get them to take one more step than it is to ask new visitors to click on your CTA in the first place. When you have someone's attention, be sure to make the most of it.
In an era when most Internet users are in a hurry and prefer to scan rather than read, you have to optimize your landing page to appeal to this new breed of consumer. If you don't even have a landing page to start with, you are missing out on an incredible opportunity to not only make sales but also to establish brand identity and credibility.
At Phoenix Online Media, we specialize in the development of landing pages that immediately grab the attention of visitors and compel them to take action. As we also create websites, we can design a site and landing page combo that represents your brand and ensures it remains embedded in the minds of your target audience.
If you don't have a landing page or your existing one is not properly optimized, you are leaving an enormous sum of money at the table. Get in touch with Phoenix Online Media now and we can discuss the specifics of your brand in order to create the best possible landing page for your business.
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