Category: Web Development

Inbound Marketing For Northwest Florida

Posted on by Chris Josten

HOW DO YOU ATTRACT CUSTOMERS WITH INBOUND MARKETING?

In today’s world, reaching your intended customer has become more demanding. Advancing your digital marketing is crucial to your success. However, one of the underlying issues with digital marketing is that customers are in a pandemic of online information. So how do you reach these individuals and provide them meaningful information?

Consumers do not want a barrage of digital information when they are looking for solutions to their problems; that’s where Inbound Marketing steps in. Inbound Marketing is the philosophy of attracting the right customers, at the right time, by producing the right content. When a consumer is searching for “Top 10 vacation spots in Florida,” your search result will be displayed because you have written an article on that very topic that has been viewed by previous consumers, organically placing your search result higher up the page.

“Inbound marketing is the philosophy of attracting the right customer…”

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric philosophy, as opposed to being product-centric. Instead of wasting valuable marketing resources on individuals who do not fit your buyer personas or are non-relevant to your product, inbound marketing focuses on creating meaningful relationships with your consumers. The ultimate goal is to produce long time advocates of your business’ product. From companies like Intel to small businesses like Joe Coffee Shop, marketing is seeing a huge shift from outbound to inbound marketing.

What makes this philosophy/strategy so advantageous, you ask?

Inbound Marketing is:
  • Cost-Effective
  • Improves Customer Relations
  • Highly Visible ROI (Return On Investment) and Metrics

INBOUND IS COST EFFECTIVE

Inbound Marketing is Ultimately Cheaper and More Effective

How is it cheaper and more effective? Instead of blindly firing your message to consumers who may or may not be interested in your services, inbound marketing aims at finding out who your buyer personas are, who your consumers should be, and then tailoring content to help find solutions to their problems. Instead of trying to find your audience, your audience will come to you. You will learn your audience, and through these exchanges, you’re able to classify your audience into different buyer personas and service them better.

Incidentally, it is a lot easier for your business to gain leads from consumers interested in something you provide or offer as opposed to those who just aren’t interested in the slightest. It’s no wonder many businesses are switching or incorporating inbound marketing into their marketing strategies, with contrast from outbound marketing to inbound marketing delivering a whopping 54% more lead generation. (Hubspot)

IMPROVES CUSTOMER RELATIONS

Inbound Marketing Creates Meaningful Relationships

One of the huge advantages of using inbound marketing is that it’s a two-way communication where customers interact with your business. They will post on your company’s social media pages, comment on your blogs, or take part in contests or surveys. When they participate, they become invested and engaged in your company. Consumers today want to be in control of what information they receive and when they receive it. Instead of bombarding them with information they may or may not care about, your company instead encourages consumers to come to you because your company has a solution to their problem. That in itself starts to create a meaningful relationship with your customers.

HIGHLY VISIBLE ROI

Everything With Inbound Marketing is Tracked

Everything within your business is analyzed; why not analyze the interactions your consumers have from the first click on your website’s link in a Google search to how they browse your site after they become customers? With a software program like Hubspot you can start analyzing which blog titles are getting the most clicks, calculating the ROI of every campaign, and understanding which ones are bringing the most money to your business. Also, for every campaign, you can analyze what parts of the campaign were successful and what parts were not, such as which call-to-actions were clicked more than others and/or what landing pages saw more visitors than others.

Need a refresher on the metrics that measure marketing success? Check out our list of key metrics and what they mean for your campaigns.

CLOSING NOTES…

For Northwest Florida companies in Panama City, Panama City Beach, Destin, Pensacola, Tallahassee, the 30A area, and beyond, inbound marketing offers so many great tools for your business. More importantly, your consumers will appreciate it! Inbound marketing does not aim at bombarding your consumers with information but rather solving issues they have with useful resources that point them in the direction of your business.

Are you ready for more customers to start pouring in? Click below!

Embrace Your Curiosity +

Web Design Must Haves for Leads Generation: Get Found Online

Posted on by admin

Websites have no use if they are not being visited.

In this part one of 4 series, we explore the first few items that every web design needs for proper and effective lead generation.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must-have to any website strategy. For SEO to be successful it takes hard work and consistency when aiming for the top spot.

Every website has the goal of reaching the number one position in search engines. What gives you that first place ranking?  Off-page search engine optimization is one factor to increasing your ranking results.

Link building is not an easy process, but it is very beneficial to your website. High-quality links connected to your website can significantly increase your chances of ranking higher on search engines. There are a couple of key tips to remember when you are building links. The first is to ensure your links create high-quality, educational, or entertaining content. Secondly submit your website to online directories. This will help categorize your website.

On-Page Optimization

On-page search engine optimization is another important aspect and consists of placing your most important keywords within the content elements of your actual pages. These on-page elements include headlines, sub-headlines, body content, image tags, and links.

To ensure your on-page search engine optimization is done right pick a primary keywords for each page. Do not use too many keywords on one page otherwise the page will lose its importance. Search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about. Focus on optimizing one keyword per page.

  • • Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline. These          areas of content have greater weight to search engines.

  • • Include keywords in the body content, but don’t use them out of context.

  • • Include the keywords in the page URL and keep the URL clean.

  • • Lastly, write for humans. Prepare your content for your audience and then    look to optimize it for search.

Meta Tags

Meta tags (a line of code that is contained in the background of a web page) is another SEO component to keep in mind. Meta tags are not as important as SEO, but they are still important. The reason why Meta tags are important is because search engines look at them to learn more about the page.

 

XML Site Maps

XML sitemaps help contain listings of all your pages and when they were updated. The incentive behind an XML sitemap is to help search engine crawlers sift through your pages more efficiently. Sitemaps are easy to create. You can find sitemap generators online that you can simply upload to the root directory of your website.

 

301 Redirects

The last component to keep in mind is a permanent 301 Redirect. This method is used to change an old URL to a new one. When a page is moved to a new URL and the old link hasn’t been directed to the new page it causes a broken website link. This causes a lost opportunity for your customers or potential buyers. 301 Redirects helps SEO know where to find your new pages.

Website Redesign: The Importance of SEO and Search Marketing – Always Perform a Site Audit

Posted on by admin

Are You In The Panama City Area Looking For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

When it comes to redesigning your website, form and function are a must.

Functionality comes before looks on your website. If people can’t find your website via search, and if they can’t intuitively navigate through your site’s pages and easily understand what information those pages contain, your site will not matter.

Redesigning your website isn’t just an exercise in aesthetics. Looks for your website are very important, but a great website redesign also requires you to improve what people can’t see.

When redesigning your website it is important to take search engine optimization into account. While the way we think about SEO is always evolving – with the focus now shifting toward optimizing content for the searchers themselves, as opposed to following designated search engine “rules” – it’s still something you can’t afford to overlook.

 

Not thinking about SEO from the start

Website redesign requires more than aesthetics. To ensure your new website will truly resonate with your target audience you need search engine optimization (SEO) to be ingrained in your design strategy from the very beginning.

For many online shoppers, their research about products begins by using search engine optimization. People want to be able to easily find free advice and information about products and other services online.

Search engine optimization will help consumers find your website in the beginning of their research. “Businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages (HubSpot Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Businesses, 2011).”

The biggest SEO mistake you can make during a website redesign is to not think about SEO from the beginning. If you don’t have SEO in mind from the initial strategy session, you’re going to lose what you have built.

Search engine optimization helps people find your website. If you build a website that people can’t find it serves no purpose. Integrate SEO in the beginning so people are able to find your website that you worked hard to build.

If you do not integrate SEO in the beginning, it can cost the company more time and money redoing design and coding.

 

Not doing an audit of your existing site.

In the beginning stages of redesigning your website, examine what is working and what isn’t for your website. Whenever doing a website redesign, it is important to reassess the purpose of each page. If you don’t learn anything from the page, neither will your viewers.

“86% of consumers stated that using a search engine allowed them to learn something new or important that helped him/her increase his/her knowledge. (Pew Research Center, Search Engine Use 2012).”

Some key metrics you may want to consider when auditing your site are:

  • Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)
  • Top performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation)
  • Number of inbound linking domains
  • Total number of pages indexed
  • Total number of pages that receive traffic.

 

Plan your site content with a sitemap.

Building out a navigation map that takes SEO into consideration will save you a lot of time and frustration throughout your website redesign.

Important elements of a website redesign oftentimes get pushed to the side when time frames are constrained. One of the most important components of a new design project is to take time at the beginning to analyze current traffic to ensure current visitors are not lost.

Review which pages on your website have incoming links, which have the best page-rank, and what keywords on your pages drive traffic and conversions. Communicate with your website redevelopment team and make sure important pages are not removed or deleted with the new layout.

Do not overlook this crucial step when redesigning your website.

Curious about SEO?

Web Design Must Haves for Leads: Exploring Proper Design and Usability

Posted on by admin

Most websites have an average of a 30-60% bounce rate.

This means a large majority of web traffic entering your website leaves without navigating to any other pages. What first impression are you giving your viewers?

Your website represents who you are and what you offer. When viewers visit your website they are looking for credibility, trust, professionalism, and stability.

Stanford University and Consumer Web Watch found that “a website’s design was more important than credibility such as having a privacy policy and awards.” The study also indicated that “the visual design may be the first test of a site’s credibility. If it fails on this criterion, web users are likely to abandon the site…”

A great web design should include:

Proper use of colors

To attract your audience and draw attention to select elements, use the right colors for your audience. Do not try to make everything jump out. Your audience will avoid the chaotic mix of colors. Stick to 2-4 colors for your template.

Animations, gadgets, and media

Only implement this to help support content and information. Avoid anything unnecessary.
Layout: A clear navigation structure is a must. Avoid clutter. Organize page elements in a grid fashion instead of scattering them randomly.

Typography

Use fonts, font sizes, and font colors that are easy to read to ensure your site is legible. This brings us to our next element. Maintain consistency. Keep your elements on your site consistent from page-to-page. Consistency will help your visitors navigate your site with ease. This will help your visitors from feeling lost.

 

Images

Images can be a powerful element to any website. Although stock images are easily accessible and inexpensive, visitors prefer real imagery. Marketing Experiments performed an experiment comparing the use of stock photography verses real imagery on a website. They found that photos of real people out-performed the stock photos by 95%. Stock images tend to be irrelevant.

Ultimately, make sure that anyone visiting your website can view it no matter what browser or application they are using. Accessibility is a key element to your website’s growth. Visitors should be able to view your website on a mobile device, a tablet, and a computer. Your website will get more views by allowing everyone to view your site no matter what kind of system they use.

During the Web Design Process, Stay Relevant and Don’t Send Visitors Down a Rabbit Hole

Posted on by admin

Search engine optimization (SEO) requires more than the use of keywords; it requires high quality content. You can no longer keyword-stuff your way to search ranking success.

“In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site. (Google)”

Keywords are often added to websites awkwardly which can penalize your website. Content needs to be for humans first, search engines second.

Keywords should be included 1-3 times, naturally, in the page content. Make sure keywords are included in your page title, meta description, and H1 text assuming it fits within the parameters. If a keyword doesn’t work well, work towards a more general keyword. If any word doesn’t contribute to the education of the visitor it likely doesn’t fit.

Marketers can reduce additional effort by including an SEO keyword analysis at the front end of a web redesign project – during website strategy development, then using the findings and recommendations from the keyword analysis to inform content development.

One way to ensure your content has useful keywords is to look at search engines trends such as Google. Refer to historical data to find seasonal content that has done well in the past. Keywords can keep web pages focused, which is important for SEO.

Another way to successfully create content during your website redesign is to capture all the on-site searches that visitors are doing on your site. This will help create helpful content for your viewers.

To successfully redesign your website focus on content development during the beginning phases of your redesign process.

 

Not setting up 301 redirects will send your visitors down a rabbit hole

During a website redesign your old URL needs to be transferred to your new URL. This is where 301 directs come in handy.  A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another.

When a page is moved to a new URL and the old link hasn’t been directed to the new page it causes a broken website link. This causes a lost opportunity for your customers or potential buyers. 301 Redirects helps SEO know where to find your new pages.

Launching a new website without putting 301 redirects will cause you to lose all of your past SEO history and your rankings will decrease.

Before doing any 301 redirects, create URL outline of your old site. Excel is a simple way to outline your old website. You can create a tab for each of your main menu sections and list all menu sub items with their corresponding URL in that tab.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make when redesigning websites is that they create new pages to replace old ones and eliminate old website pages that they no longer want to include in their site.

You are eliminating all of the search engine optimization value that you’ve built up over time by eliminating old pages without redirecting them to the new URL.

In order to keep your SEO ranking high, create a 301 redirect to let search engines know where to find the new page you are creating so your SEO ranking will follow you to your new website.

Web Design Must Haves for Leads: Content is King

Posted on by admin

With the rise of inbound marketing…

With the rise of inbound marketing, content has become one of the most important aspects of any website. Content is what visitors and search engines are looking for. It also helps drive visitors to your site and turns prospects into leads.

Give your visitors clear messages. You want your visitors to know what you do within seconds, understand the page they’re on and what it’s about, what to do next, and why they should buy/subscribe/download from this site instead of someone else.

There are a few helpful tips to direct you in delivering the right message

  1. Create a few headlines and sub-headline ideas for your most important pages. This helps you portray to your buyer why they should buy from you.
  2. Include clear call-to-actions. Include links in your body copy, next step links at the end of the copy, and calls-to-action wherever appropriate.
  3. Test your copy. For the most accurate indication of winning a headline, use A/B testing to determine which variation drive the most conversions. You can use tools like HubSpot’s A/B Testing Tools, Google’s Website Optimizer, or services like 5 Second Test.

Educate your viewers about your offers.

Offer them more than product content. Provide eBooks, whitepapers, videos, and other forms of content that is educational. This will help your viewers feel as if they are receiving valuable information along the way and not just a sales pitch.

Offer your viewers quality content.

Create fresh content for your homepage that people can value. Know who your audience is when providing content. Create content that is relevant to your buyers and know your subject well. It is important to have accurate content when you write for your audience.

Keep your content clear.

Avoid using jargon terms and phrases; your audience will render them meaningless. In this day in age, consumers want the truth. They do not want advertising trickery, marketing cliques, and surreptitious methods of persuasion. Focus your content on being clear, not clever, and you will find that more people will trust you.

Blogging

Blogging is one of the most important assets to any inbound marketing strategy and it’s a perfect complement to your website. Blogging creates fresh content for SEO, it helps establish you as an industry authority and thought leader, it helps drive more traffic and leads back to your website, and it’s a great channel to converse and engage with your audience and customers. Blogging will also help make your content shareable and social.

 

Testimonials

Lastly, provide customer testimonials and reviews to prove to potential customers that you’ve successfully helped existing customers. Leverage other online sites to provide reviews such as Yelp to collect testimonials.

Website Redesign: Consider your URL structure and referral sources

Posted on by Chris Josten

Looking further into mistakes commonly made when designing or redesigning a website

Another two points we would like to cover are URL Structure and Shady resources for backlinks

Failing to consider your URL structure

Your URLs play a significant role in your SEO success. If your URLs don’t align well with the actual content of your site pages, you should consider restructuring it during your website redesign.

A general rule to follow when creating a new URL: use dashes (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL. Underscores are treated as connectors by Google. It will only return results when you search for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. Using dashes creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered.

Your URL structure needs to be organized for the user experience. Use keywords in your URL you are targeting for ranking. Keywords in your URL will help indicate to those who see your URL that they are getting what they want and expect. Keep the structure organized for user experience.

Shorter URLs between (less than 50 characters) are preferred for usability and user experience. Search engines are able to process long URLs without trouble, but it is important to write for humans first and think of SEO second.

Lastly, when creating a URL make sure it is accessible for all devices. Mobile friendly pages are normally ranked the highest in SEO.  Let major search engines know which web pages on your site are mobile friendly in a sitemap.

 

Leaving shady backlinks in place

Backlinks are incoming hyperlinks from one web page to another website. The more backlinks you have pointing back to your website, the more popular it will be.

When you create backlinks for your website, keep in mind that Google and other search engines prefer quality over quantity. Google prefers natural links.

A website redesign is a great opportunity for you to analyze your backlinks and remove the suspicious ones. Backlinks are great to have, but if Google suspects that there are spammy, low-quality sites linking to your site, your rankings could suffer.

A common mistake: Your search engine optimization firm built hundreds of bad backlinks to your website. Google’s penguin algorithm update in 2012 included penalization to websites that built erroneous back links in an attempt to drive ranking. Site links from unrelated sources, micro-sites, and false sources do more harm than good post-Penguin.

You can fix this mistake in your redesign by using Link Research Tools. This will provide detail on harmful link and help you get them removed from your site quickly and efficiently.

 

Most marketers think only about link-building instead of link-earning. Focus on making your content easy for your audiences to consume, understand, and share.

Responsive Design and Thinking like a Human; Two Necessities of Web Design Today

Posted on by Chris Josten

These items as crucial for both Human and Search Engine View of your site.

Your website needs to be able to reach viewers on different devices such as: desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. “27% of consumers will leave a site if it is not mobile-optimized. (ExactTarget,2014 Mobile Behavior Report).”

Implementing Responsive Design

Responsive design is your best option for delivering a great search and browsing experience to mobile users. This will cause your website’s URLs to be the same across all devices and will all serve up the same HTML code. It is always better to provide the same layout of your website on all devices because people like consistency.

“Customer preference is the most cited targeting dimension that companies are using in mobile marketing, with location as the second most cited. (Forrester, MMA, and Velti, Present and Future Mobile Marketing.)”

The most popular device customers and potential customers use today are smartphones. Majority of consumers use mobile friendly sites because they are of the opinion that mobile-optimized sites run faster than non-mobile-optimized sites. Hence giving them the information in a better more timely experience.

With responsive design, the only thing that changes across devices is the styling. This configuration makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages and retrieve your content. “This improvement in crawling efficiently can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.”

Failing to think like a human

When designing o redesigning your website you have to think like a human. Humans want answers. Search engines such as Google have gained the ability to recognized full-sentence queries instead of picking out the individual words that make up a query.

The best information comes from websites that are crafted with humans in mind.

A couple of rules to follow for search engine optimization are: make sure your content adds value to visitors and to write about what you know.

  • • Always add value. Backlinks and keyword rank are important to gain through your visitors. If          your content is valuable, people will read and share it.
  • • When creating content write about what you know. Keep your content natural for viewers.              People will find you more reputable and seek advice from you if you keep your content simple      and natural.
  • • Search engine optimization is not the top priority when it comes to redesigning your website.

The best way to ensure you are focusing on humans before SEO is to make sure you are writing natural content that your viewers can relate to. Whenever you focus on humans first, SEO takes care of itself.

Growth Driven Design: A Smarter Approach to Web Design and Development

Posted on by Chris Josten

Most websites today are currently built as a set project with a web design team working to put together a perfectly designed website, working on a hypothesis of what type of flow your site visitors will use and how they get to the information that you feel is important to promote your business.

Recent studies have shown that most websites after launch go at least two years before being updated or refreshed. Hence, in some cases, websites can be a headache to small business owners.

The problem.

The way customers search online for businesses and services is always changing. Google, Bing, and Yahoo continually change their search algorithms to better match the way consumers search and the behaviors they follow.  With these changes for best results, your business website needs to change as well.  But how is this accomplished?

Growth Driven Design.

Growth Driven Design is a new approach to designing and building a website. Instead of working the standard 8-10 weeks around a hypothesis, you launch as a website as quickly as possible and then work to keep your site fresh based on real-time marketing and testing results.  Doing this allows your site to be an evolving marketing tool.  Constant change and updates allow you to keep your website optimized for better lead generation and a central goal of generating more revenue.  But the most valuable point to Growth Driven Design is that changes and modifications are no longer based on a hypothesis. The evolution of your site is now based off of actual data gathered from customers.

Some ways to boost your websites conversions include:

 

  • • Creating content continually
  • • Focus on conversion rate – the higher, the better
  • • Test images by swapping between different colors and styles and moods
  • • Run a Usability Test
  • • Install tracking software to track your user’s experience
  • • Personalize for your target Client persona
  • • Reorganize your navigation for easier site search
  • • Increase Search Engine Exposure

 

With the above list of items, you can test your site and check again to focus on enhancing your client’s experience.  The more your site can be customized towards the needs of your site visitors, the bigger the impact you will have on your conversion rate and a higher return on your investment.  Although the process takes a larger amount of time over the traditional website approach, the sky is the limit of improvements and successes of your site.

Web Design Must Haves for Leads: Become a Conversion Machine

Posted on by Chris Josten

You have the leads, now what?

To increase your websites conversions, you must have effective calls-to-action, CTA positioning, newsletters, landing pages and forms for your landing page.

The effect of a successful Call to Action is to drive a visitor to take a desired action. CTAs are the key to lead generation but they need to be done right to convert traffic into leads. The position of your call-to-actions is important also. Think about where you will be placing your CTAs. Do not place CTAs everywhere; that will give people too many options.

In order to drive CTAs you need to drive those links to landing pages. Landing pages are used to convert visitors into leads by completing a transaction or by collecting contact information from them. Landing pages consist of:

  1. A headline and (optional) sub-headline.
  2. A brief description of the offer/CTA.
  3. At least one supporting image.
  4. (Optional) supporting elements such as testimonials or security badges.
  5. And most importantly, a form to capture information.

Newsletters

Newsletters are easy to offer and effective. Not all CTAs need to be big offers. Newsletters or mailing lists are the perfect way to collect email addresses so you can nurture prospects over time to become leads. Make sure it is easy for people to find your subscription form.

 

Landing Pages

Landing pages are necessary to implement because they direct your visitors to one particular offer without the distractions of everything else on your website.

Once you’ve completed your landing page, it is important to have a form that customers can fill out to sign-up, subscribe to your site, or download an offer. Forms are the key to a landing page. Recommendations for landing page forms:

  • • Only ask for the information you need. Avoid asking for sensitive information that companies or                consumers may not want to disclose.
  • • Consider the value of the offer. The more valuable an offer may be perceived, the more information        you may be able to ask for in return.
  • • Lastly, reduce anxiety for your clients by adding a privacy message that indicates their email will not      be shared or sold. Avoid using the word submit on your form buttons; offer them a free download or      newsletter instead.

Internet usage is growing rapidly which makes a website an important factor for your business. The integration of search engine optimization, social media, blogging, content, call-to-actions, and landing pages will drive traffic, leads, and sales.