Website Redesign: Consider your URL structure and referral sources

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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

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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

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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

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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.

How to Build a Strong Wellness Marketing: Set Your Goals

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A strong healthcare digital marketing presence is important in order to reach your audience. Since most people begin their healthcare search online, it is vital to have a strong digital presence.

There are two ways you can be successful with healthcare digital marketing:

  1. Establish your audience. Who are you trying to reach?
  2. Set long term goals for your practice. For example: How many people need to be reached in for the practice to be successful?

Establishing the audience is the most important step. Who does your practice benefit? Healthcare digital marketing is important!

88% of adults in the U.S. have a cell phone, 57% have a laptop, 19% own an e-reader, and 19% have a tablet. Cell phones are the dominant communication tool in the United States, but information is searched in various ways. It is important to optimize healthcare digital marketing for all devices used by your target audience (Pew Internet).

In order to acquire more patients, you must build rapport with them. The use of ethos (ethics), logos (logic), and pathos (empathy) is the best way to create rapport and grow your healthcare digital marketing.

Your ethos (ethics) is important to patients. It is important for your patients to trust your character.

Be reputable. Logos (logic) is a vital aspect in growing a practice. You must show expertise in your field in order to grow your practice.

Lastly, show patients you have empathy (ethos) for them.

Studies have proven that in order to be successful you must create goals. A common mnemonic device that helps is SMART:

Specific: Is the detail in the information sufficient to pinpoint problems or opportunities? Establish your specific goals.

Measurable: Quantitative or qualitative are the ways you can measure your success. Create a metric for your practice.

Actionable: Can the information be used to improve performance? The objective should change the staffs’ behavior for this to be successful.

Relevant: Can the information be applied to the specific problem faced by the marketer?

Time-Bound: What objective do you need to accomplish? Create a time frame for each goal.

The establishment of audience and goals are vital to create a successful digital marketing presence.

2 Items to Never Forget When Launching a Website Redesign

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You’ve finshed the redesign of your website, now what?

The process is done, you followed our steps to make sure your site is up to today’s standards and the site has launched.  There are a couple items that need to be checked to make sure your newly designed site can be found and tracked.

Unblock search engines from crawling your site

When launching your website after a redesign, it’s important to double check that the search engines know where to find you. A common mistake people do is block search engines from their website during the redesign phase and forget to unblock them when the site is complete.

This issue can cause problems when sometimes developers forget to unblock robots from crawling and indexing the website after the website goes live. Search engine optimization is one of the main resources people use to research and purchase a product.

 

“SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising have a 1.7% close rate. (Search Engine Journal.)”

 

 

One reason this happens is because the site is in a dev environment and has robots.txt set to block all search robots. A robot.txt file is a simple text file placed on your web server which informs webcrawlers like Googlebot if they should access a file or not.

The site is then taken live with all-exclusive robots.txt file still in place and the site’s search traffic reduces.

Search engine optimization allows people to be able to find your website. You can double check with Google Webmaster tools to ensure your site is being indexed.

 

Add analytics tracking to your site

Your website redesign needs to be compared to your old website with analytics software. Once your new website is released, you should be collecting data on its performance.

A couple of questions to ask yourself after you apply tracking software are:

  • • Did your content audit and keyword research pay off?
  • • Is that new URL structure making it easier for visitors to navigate through your pages?

The goal being you want your new website to have a higher conversion rate than your old site. It is impossible to measure without any conversion code or analytics tracking it. That is why it is important to paste the proper Google analytics code on the new website.

Another reason it is important to track your data is to drive continual improvement of the online experience to your customers and prospects.

If your website redesign is not easier for customers and potential clients to use then your new website is not serving its purpose.

Ultimately, your website redesign should add value to your viewers. Analytics will help you make improvements to your website and your sites visitation will increase.

How to Build a Strong Wellness Marketing Strategy: Establish the right tools

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The establishment of tools and process is the next step to have a successful digital marketing presence. Define the tools and roles of your team to help your content marketing to flow timely and consistently.

To help your content flow timely, establish a calendar for your team. Your team needs to know your upcoming goals and plans for the practice. Calendars can also help measure your successes.

To create effective content consistently, a content management system is a necessity. This is the software that organizes your content and publishes it online.

An example of a content management system is HubSpot. It is used by thousands of businesses and they love it. “Since implementing HubSpot’s software and inbound marketing methodology, we have grown organic traffic by 450%. We’ve been able to optimize the business that comes from those visits, too; our inbound lead-to-win conversion rate continues to increase.” –LevelEleven.

Defining team roles is an important step in establishing a strong digital marketing presence. There are six roles to establish for your team.

  1. The leader: This person’s main goal is to lead and guide others on the team and keep the schedule moving.
  2. The researcher: This team member needs to have a strong understanding of Search Engine Optimization. They also keep the practice up-to-date on search algorithms, requirements for faster ranking, and ad bid managements.
  3. The writer: In order for the business to be successful, content must be written. Having a writer on your team is necessary to keep content across all platforms- website, blog, social media, etc.
  4. The coder: It is important for content to link back to your website. The website coder is responsible for this step.
  5. The data miner: A team member that is designated to this task helps manage and drive your strategy solution and provide analytics and reporting for the time
  6. The bonus:The last person is a “bonus” for the team. The 6th team member is responsible for creativity with design ideas.

It is the leader’s responsibility to keep the team on track. “Websites that are packed with good quality content have long enjoyed benefits of high search engine positions and good conversion rates (Inbound Now).” Questions to keep in mind when generating content are:

  • • Who is the target market?
  • • What is the purpose of the content?
  • • How does this attract our patients?
  • • How is the content being measured?

Have a guide in place for your team. This will help them streamline production and keep the practice consistent.

Case Study Responsive Web Design for Capital Medical Society

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We would first like to thank Capital Medical Society for giving us the opportunity to help them build a more user friendly and powerful website.

Capital Medical Society came to us with a few concerns:

  • The Doctor’s Directory was lack luster
  • Website was not mobile friendly and had very poor performance outside a desktop computer
  • A non-inviting design – It lack direction and was very plain
  • Lack of editability – Client had some access, but overall making even the smallest changes were a pain

After several discussions with Capital Medical Society talking about functionality, design and editability, we turned their old Doctor’s Directory into a powerhouse of information for their users that are looking for that perfect Doctor. We included aspects of their old website that their users loved and created a more inviting/user friendly design that promotes usability and allows for mobile responsiveness. Finally, one of Capital Medical Society’s biggest concerns was the ability to edit their content without relying on a developer. Luckily this was an easy one, we build all of our websites on CMS platforms, which allow for full editability.

We look forward to helping with future projects and continuing to build a strong relationship with them. We would like to give a big shout out to Pam Wilson, Shannon Boyle and the whole Capital Medical Society team for making this a wonderful experience.

Social Media Channels Overload for Small Businesses

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It seems new social apps pop up every day. News announced just recently a 13-year old kid has been developing a new app using video as the subject matter for young people under 21 called “Lifestage”. Similar to the way Facebook started in 2004, this new app connects people within their school. The young inventor Michael Sayman was invited to learn the social media giant as an intern.The question is how do you keep up? As a business owner, it can be confusing and quite overwhelming to decide which channels to post your content on and leverage for marketing effectively. There’s hope for those who know their target audience, or buyer personas as we call them. If however you don’t know who your primary audience is, take a step back and look at your audience. Try to place yourself on the channels where you feel they spend their time. Then focus your efforts there. Monitor them for best engagement rates and performance. If you do not see the desired results, pivot your content and refocus for better results.

Another piece of advice, you don’t have to be on all of the channels. Your efforts are better focused on a few networks with a common goal / benchmark rather than spreading yourself too thin across too many networks.

Why do Google algorithm changes matter?

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The Google algorithms are computer processes and formulas that look through thousands, if not millions, of webpages for a typical search and find the most helpful information for the user. Today’s Google algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” that make it possible to guess what the user might be searching for. These signals come in a wide variety, such as the terms on a website, the freshness of content, a user’s specific region and PageRank.

Let’s dive a bit deeper and define what PageRank is exactly. PageRank is one of Google’s algorithm’s/tools used to ensure that their users are receiving the most insightful, useful and meaningful content. PageRank is broken up into a few different sections: system features, related work, system anatomy, results and performance as well as conclusions. Within each of these sections they are broken down even further but that is a very complex and very long discussion.

Why does this matter to my website?

The reason Google’s algorithms matter to your website and ultimately to your buyers is because these algorithms are the reason and the way your buyers first come in contact with your website while they are in the discovery phase of their buyer’s journey. The discovery phase of a buyer’s journey is when they have an issue but do not quite know what the solution to it may be. The reason they are searching the web is to find a solution or information about their problem. Wouldn’t you like to be the solution to their problem? Turn these strangers towards your company and ultimately into promoters of your company.

Let’s take a moment to be very clear, Google does not care about your website specifically, they care about making sure their users receive the most valuable content they can provide.

Penguin 4.0

With the latest version of Google’s Penguin algorithm it is even more crucial to stay on top of your website. Google’s data is refreshed in real time with the latest Penguin release, so changes will be visible much faster; typically taking effect shortly after a recrawl and reindex is completed. With all these changes it is imperative that your marketing team stays on top of these changes and is ensuring that they are hitting the key points that effect your PageRank.

How we can help.

If by the end of this article you have learned something or now have a question in the back of your mind, whether your marketing team is keeping up with these updates and ensuring your content is presenting the most insightful, useful, meaning and freshest content, contact us today. We would love to talk to you more about your buyer’s journey, growth driven design and ultimately how we can help your business reach your buyers.