Do you want to improve your website and do not know where to start?
There are hundreds of things you could be doing. If you do not know where to start here are 13 tips to improve your page:
1. Make the navigation easy – Reduce thenumber of options
Got thirteen elements in the navigation bar? A cleaner navigation makes things easier to find. Whenthings are easier to find, itcreates a better experience for visitors.
2. Having a call to action oneach page
Do not make your visitors think. Put a button, a hyperlink or something on every page that leads to action, which ultimate is what you want them to do.
3. Put your phone number on the home page
It seems obvious, right? However, many do not do this. Oftenthe pone isburied in a contact page … Big mistake! Many visitors go to your web site only to find your phone number, so it’s important to keep it in your home page. The upper right corner is the best place.
4. Add the opening times
Can I call you at 6 in the morning? This question and others are in the heads of your customers more than you think.
5. Add a page about yourself or your business
Who are you? Do you work with a big team? When a business person – or a customer – select a company to do business, they often want to know with whom they are working. Adding photos from your computer with real biographies is a plus. In short: it shows you’re a true human being.
6. Use big, bold images
This seems to be a trend in web design, but it is because larger images speak for them selves. Capture y our visitors with beautiful images.
7. Make your website look good on mobile
It’s hard to navigate a site that is not optimized for a small screen. One of the facilities available today is the responsive design.
8. Branding
Did you just updated your logo or you changed the colors of your company? Make sure your site is up to date as much as possible.
9. Cut the distractions (music and splashpages)
The music on a web is an error, rather than help can annoyed the user because he has to look into how to turn it off and frustrate him so he would probably abandon your web site.
10. Put links to your social networks
Start with a Facebook page or Twitter account and focus on the control of one of them, then jump to the next one.
11. Put your customers to work – get testimonials
Your current customers are a great asset to your company because that may give case studies of real world – and evidence – as to how your company has helped save time, save money, etc. … Ask your best customers for testimonials.
12. Be clear about the main goal of your website
Why have a website? What do you want your web site to do for your business? When you answer this add or remove pages and consider restructuring your website if necessary.
13. Hire a professional
All points above lead me to the lasttip; Hire a professional. You can get the Project done yourself, but if you want to level up let a professional help you and give you advice.
We hope this have been helpful. Anything that you need we will be at your disposal.
The New Method Web Marketing: Service Driven Campaigns
The word is out and the word is good. We are in the dawn of a new era of Web marketing and nothing could be better for businesses and consumers. The piecemeal perspective of fragmented marketing services is in a state of rapid decline, with the advent of an integrated / holistic approach to creating inbound marketing channels quickly coming into vogue. But, while this new paradigm is now coming to the attention of mainstream marketing, it has long been in practice by any legitimate Web marketing agency.
In the past, the Web was awash with a la carte online marketing service providers. SEO firms, social media marketers, Web developers, email marketers, etc., all battled for the attention of potential clients while jamming statistics down the consumer’s throat about why their marketing services were superior to all the others. But one must ask: how could they possibly know which marketing channel would be most effective for your business without knowing the intricacies of your business, assets and industry? The short answer is that they couldn’t. You cannot take something to market effectively unless you understand the market competitively. Whether through ignorance or arrogance, these firms would tout the benefits of their offerings while having no idea about the most effective areas in which to compete on the Web.
The essence of this paradigm was to sell, sell, and sell, irrespective of the actual benefit they offered to potential clients / businesses. This led to oversold, overpromised and under-delivered marketing campaigns that heaped distrust and greatly tarnished the reputation of competent Web marketing agencies everywhere. What these stand-alone service providers failed to understand was that successful Web marketing strategies looked at the entire process as a chain of events with each step as important as the one precipitating it. Akin to a relay race, if the baton gets dropped you simply don’t win the race.
Even more frustrating were the marketing companies that offered a multitude of Web marketing services but without ever understanding how they all worked together. At the core of their failings was a revenue driven business model that left service distantly behind by the wayside.
Today there is a powerful awakening in the Web marketing industry to this change in strategy… at least it is better late than never. Unfortunately though, by and large this evolution is driven by a reaction to the market instead of being a driving factor of market change. In essence, they are still missing it. They are not catching the glimpse of the bigger picture: Service.
Henry Ford was famously quoted as saying, “The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.” This prophetic little piece is still accurate today and is the true catalyst behind the massive overhaul to Internet marketing currently underway. While this change might be something new to a majority of Web marketers as an obligatory adaptation forced upon them if they wish to survive the transition, as stated earlier, it is nothing new to any legitimate Web marketing agency.
Service oriented business is good business. If you have cared about your clients, understood their business and competitive playing field and treated their budget like it was your own, then you have been adhering to this marketing panacea for some time now. You’ve understood how social media merges with SEO, how a website’s development supports optimization and how its design maximizes CTR and UX. You know how retargeting advertisements, continuity of branding in email marketing and touching potential consumers respectfully through multiple marketing channels is essential. You have sat down with your clients and understood their strongest assets to leverage, opportunities to take advantage of and what you can do to position their business for long-term growth, achieving the greatest ROI possible. You did not sell them a level 2 / tier 2 SEO package, thus performing a checklist of optimization tasks before cashing their check and never looking back. You were a legitimate Web marketing agency & the emerging trend of service oriented marketing is nothing new. Tip of the hat from Capisco if this has always been your approach.
Finding an effective way to market your business online can be tricky business. There is so much competition in reaching potential customers through the Internet that it is now more crucial than ever to understand the subtleties of the digital marketplace that you want to compete in.
Online marketing in Orange County offers a particular set of unique challenges and benefits for small or medium businesses (SMB) competing to connect with consumers locally. Where most people identify themselves with the municipality they reside within, customers in Orange County will identify themselves with both the city they live within as well as their county. So, when considering how to position your digital presence think about which geo-targeted term might fit you better.
One deciding factor when making this consideration is to gauge how far the average customer would be willing to travel for your goods / services. If they are only willing to travel 10 – 15 miles then you might want to focus on identifying your business’ Web presence with your city; if it is over 15 miles then your business would be a good candidate to affiliate it’s Web presence with OC.
Another important factor to weigh is how often do customers search by the city they reside in versus the county? Google offers you a free tool to see: www.adwords.google.com/. Run a few traffic reports with Google’s keyword analysis tool and get an idea of which geo-targeted term gets the most search queries. Be sure include the services you wish to market with the regional affiliation when you do your research.
Below I’ve included two example businesses (Dentist | Marketing) with some desirable search terms to research:
Example 1 – A Dentist in Dana Point: (Service + Geo-target)
Dentist Dana Point
Dentist Orange County
Teeth cleaning Orange County
Teeth cleaning Dana Point…..
Example 2 – A Web Marketing Company in Orange County (Service + Geo Target)
Web Marketing Orange County
Online Marketing Orange County
Web Marketing OC
Online Marketing OC
So, come up with your own list of “service + Geo-target” keywords for your business and enter it into Google’s keyword tool. Google will tell you the monthly search volume for each of your terms. Once you have this information you will have a good idea of how customers tend to search for your services in your area and how to develop your Web presence to maximize your visibility in those areas.
Good evening America. We’ve noticed a lot of esoteric acronyms and Web marketing terms being thrown around out there in the digital world so we thought we would do everyone a favor and get them all together under one roof.
If you see any that we missed, shoot us an email and we’ll give you credit and make the edit.
Thanks to the Capisco Marketing team and some friends of Capisco that lent a hand putting this all together. We’d also like to give an honorable mention to our dear friend caffeine.
Web Marketing Definitions
:: Acronyms ::
CMS – Content Management System. A system to manage, edit, modify and publish content for a website. Example: WordPress or Magento
CPA – Cost Per Acquisition / Action. The amount an advertiser or company is willing to pay for a predesignated action.
CPC – Cost Per Click. The average cost an advertiser or company is charged per click they receive.
CPL – Cost Per Lead. The amount an advertiser or company is willing to pay for a lead.
CPM – Cost Per 1000 Impressions. The 1000 comes from the Roman Numeral (M) which equals 1000.
CPS – Cost Per Sale. The amount an advertiser or company is willing to pay for a sale.
CRM – Client / Customer Relationship Management. A tool to manage communication and sales outreach. Example: Salesforce
CTR – Click Through Rate. The rate at which a person clicks on a specific ad, button, place or product. Clicks / Impressions = CTR
eCPC – Effective Cost Per Click. Calculated by multiplying the CPA by the conversion rate for an offer or advertisement.
PPC – Pay Per Click. The amount an advertiser is willing to pay per click.
SEM – Search Engine Marketing. When correctly used it refers to a SEO campaigned coupled with a paid search campaign. Often incorrectly understood to mean paid search marketing only.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization. The act of optimizing a website to increase its organic rankings for targeted keyword phrases.
SERP(s) – Search Engine Result Page. The page displayed on a search engine resulting from a search query that was entered.
SMM – Social Media Marketing. Marketing outreach through social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.
SMS – Short Message Service. Text message advertisements of 160 characters or less that are sent to cell phones.
UX – User Experience. Refers to webpage elements that impact the site visitor’s / user’s experience such as design, layout, call to action, written copy, images and navigation.
:: Terms ::
Above the Fold / Below the Fold – A term used in the heydays of print advertising that has endured into the digital age. Originally referring to the fold of newspapers, above the fold refers to the area of a website immediately visible to the site visitor as soon as the page loads. Below the fold refers to any part of a webpage that a site visitor has to scroll down to view.
Action – Anytime a site visitor performs a certain act: fill out a lead form, buy a product, etc.
Ad Copy – Short & clickable text of a PPC or contextual ad.
Ad Platform – A place to buy media or traffic.
Affiliate Marketing – A type of marketing where businesses outsource a portion of their online advertising efforts through to affiliates who then arbitrage traffic sources to earn a commission.
Affiliate Networks – An entity that acts as a middleman, aggregating advertisements from businesses and offering them to affiliates / publishers to run traffic and earn a commission.
Arbitrage – Buying traffic or a product from one source and quickly selling it to another source for a profit.
Assets – All of the creative material necessary for an advertisement (copy, pictures, subject lines, links, promotion, logo, branding guidelines).
Backlinks – Inbound links from other websites that connect to your website.
Black Hat SEO – Optimization techniques that work to game the search algorithm to gain undeserved improvement to SERP rankings and can result in site ranking penalization by Google / Yahoo / Bing when discovered.
Bounce Rate (email) – The percent of recipients from an e-blast that fail to receive delivery of the email sent.
Bounce Rate (website) – The percent of site visitors that leave quickly, usually 15 seconds or less.
Call to Action – The desired act by consumers that a website / advertisement / post was designed to promote or orchestrate.
CAN-SPAM – Email marketing guidelines established by Congress in 2003 limiting spam and regulating marketing email distribution.
Click – A unique click on a link or advertisement that leads the view to a new webpage.
Collateral – Printed advertising material meant for distribution (business cards, pamphlets, menu cards, brochures).
Contextual Advertising – Advertising on space made available by users who download certain browser add-ons. These add-ons then display pop-up ads selected through an automated system based on the content the user is viewing.
Conversion Rate – The amount of site conversions divided by the amount of site visitors.
Copy – The written content of a website, newspaper, magazine or similar publication.
Creatives – The imagery, video and pictures used in an advertisement.
Display Marketing – Marketing through image-based ad displays on high traffic websites.
Double Opt-In – The act of a consumer agreeing a second time to receive marketing material from a specific source often used in email marketing as a requisite for white-listing.
Email Marketing – Marketing to consumers through newsletters or e-blasts.
Google Algorithm – A proprietary input function used in determining an indexed site’s relevance to certain search queries.
Grey Hat SEO – Optimization efforts that utilize both white hat and a moderate amount of black hat SEO techniques to improve SERP rankings while flying under the radar of the major search engines.
Hard Bounce (email) – An email message that is permanently undeliverable due to the message being sent to an invalid / nonexistent email address or to a server that has blocked the sending server.
Impression – Anytime an advertisement is displayed for viewing it is counted as 1 impression.
Incentivized Traffic – Web traffic that results from offering the consumer a benefit (monetary or otherwise) for performing a specific act.
Media Buy – Buying media space on an advertising platform: Television, PPC, Radio, Print Publications, Web Display Traffic, etc.
Mobile Traffic – Traffic resulting from advertisements shown on mobile devices.
Opt-In – The act of a consumer agreeing to receive marketing material from a certain source. Usually used in email and SMS marketing.
Organic Traffic – Traffic resulting from organic listings on SERP(s).
Page Conversion – The occurrence of a site visitor, or ad viewer, performing a certain desired act.
Pop-unders – A new browser window featuring promotions that pops underneath the content of a webpage.
Pop-ups – A new browser window featuring promotions that pops-up over the content of a webpage.
Re-Targeted Advertising – Specifically targeting site visitors with advertising related to a site they recently visited.
Search Traffic – Traffic resulting from PPC or organic search listings.
Soft Bounce (email) – An email message that has failed to be delivered due to the recipient’s mailbox being full, the receiving server being down or the message being too large to be received.
Suppression / Unsubscribe – The act of opting-out of receiving further marketing promotions from an advertiser or company. Email marketers have exactly 10 days to cease sending you advertisements from the day you unsubscribe or risk being in violation of the CAN-SPAM act of 2003.
Tracking Pixel – A portion of code that is place in a website to track which clicks or sources of traffic result in page conversions.
White Hat SEO – Proper and approved search engine optimization techniques used to improve a site’s SERP rankings for targeted keywords
White Listing – A status given to publishers / advertisement distributers who are approved to send unfiltered traffic to a source of consumers.
Wireframe – The skeleton or layout detailing where all the creative elements and copy will be displayed on the design of a new website.
Author’s Note: This article is meant only as an introduction into search marketing and is the first of a series on Internet marketing. Please check back weekly for updates. The terms capitalized and noted with an asterisk (*) have been defined at the bottom of the article for the reader’s convenience. It is highly suggested that readers continue their research at length, confine themselves to a small budget or seek professional assistance before beginning any SEM campaign(s).
– Search Engine Marketing –
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is arguably the most powerful marketing tool for any business. It is the method used to derive the highest quality of traffic on the Web. But, because the best traffic comes from search engines, the world of SEM is highly competitive.
Businesses battle one another every day to establish a dominant Web presence and to claim the valuable streams of search traffic for their own. Some wage a war of arbitrage through strategic paid listings on the major search engines. This is known as Paid Per Click or PPC marketing. Other businesses might focus their efforts to achieve a high Organic Ranking* on Google, Yahoo or Bing. This is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Some businesses take the holistic approach and combine these efforts. This would be a complete SEM campaign.
– Search Engine Optimization –
SEO is the acronym that stands for search engine optimization and refers to the various efforts involved with ranking a website well on a search engine’s organic listings. Just as the aesthetics and functionality of a website markets to the eye of a human, the Coding*, Content* and Reach* of a website markets to the digital eye of the search engines.
Crawlers, Spiders or Robots* from each search engine are constantly Crawling* each website on the Internet, endlessly trying to determine what that website is about and relevant to. The more Google, Yahoo or Bing rate a site relevant to a search query, the higher a site will rank for that specific search query.
In general, SEO is broken-up into two parts: On-page optimization and Off-page optimization.
On-page optimization is related to anything done local to the website that is meant to improve the page’s rank. This would include tweaks in coding (header tags, image names, title tags, meta tags…) as well as the addition of any new pages or changes to content.
Off-page optimization refers to all things done off a website to improve its rank. This is principally done through a series of techniques to entice other relevant websites to link into the website that is being optimized. Also known as a backlinking campaign, this includes: Web directory submissions, blogs, forum posts, social media, press releases, etc. If successful, the site will begin to receive inbound links and a secondary effort will be made to ensure the referring links are refined to be Keyword* specific.
But, before any of this can begin, an analysis must be done to figure out what keywords will be targeted.
– Analysis –
All optimization campaigns must start with an in-depth keyword analysis to target relevant traffic for the site being optimized. An extensive review of a company’s business model and the target demographics of its clientele are essential for selecting the proper keywords to be researched.
Keyword research is done through a series of steps often beginning at Google Adwords* or Bing Ads*. Each Ad Platform offers a treasure trove of statistics and insight into a keyword’s estimated traffic, the competitiveness for rankings and even suggests alternative keywords to target.
Additional steps are also taken to review competing websites, what backlinks those sites have, and how best compete against them or possibly around them.
– PPC –
Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) is another form of search traffic that, while still outstanding, is considered of slightly less quality than organic search traffic. Though it requires paying a search engine for a favorable listing position with the cost tallied for each unique click your site receives through that listing, it can be an excellent way of circumventing the competition’s entrenched organic rankings as well as providing instantaneous traffic relief for a website. Where an SEO campaign can take three to six months for traction to take hold, a PPC campaign can deliver traffic within moments of going live.
PPC traffic is easily identified as the listings on the far right column of a Search Engine Result Page* (SERP) as well as the first few listings with a lightly shaded background in the center column. The cost of a targeted keyword is determined by the competitiveness, frequency and desired positioning related to that keyword. As these determining metrics vary daily, so too does the cost of PPC traffic on a related keyword. It is for that reason that PPC campaigns must be monitored daily to avoid an extended negative ROI.
Well, that about sums it up. Be sure to check back for more articles every week. Email chris@capiscomarketing.comif there are any specific subjects you would like treated and we’ll try to address them in our blog series or email you back directly. Thanks for reading!
– Defined Terms –
Organic Ranking: The non-paid ordinal SERP listing based upon a website’s relevancy to the specific search term queried
Coding: All programming that allows a website to function (HTML, CSS, C++, Python…)
Content: Images, video, written copy; all media that might engage the visitor of a website
Reach (website): Reach refers to a website’s ripple effect on the Internet; reposts of content, discussions about a website or its products, backlinking, 3rd party sharing of information, are all aspects of a site’s reach.
Crawlers, Spiders and Robots: Terms for search engine computers used to scan websites for indexing
Keyword: A single word or phrase targeted for search traffic
Google Adwords / Bing Ads: Search Engine Ad Platforms used to buy Search or Display traffic
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The page displayed on a search engine after a search query has been entered.
