When was the last time you updated your company website? Today? Last week? Last month? Last year? I’m hoping it was no later than last week, but a recent report suggests otherwise. SiteKreator’s Small Business Usage Study found that 54% of small businesses update their websites less than once per month.
Website Marketing Strategies
Clearing up Confusion About Bounce Rate
Search engines are a funny thing. An evolving thing. If you think you mastered SEO techniques when marketing your business last year, surprise!
It’s like this:
On the one side, you have search engines that want to bring the most relevant information to the forefront to make
searching the online super-highway easier for the searcher, i.e. your potential customer. It’s a noble cause, they’re not the devil.
As a matter of fact, they don’t want to be manipulated so that marketers take advantage and the consumer ends up only having the choices that marketers want them to have. They don’t want information to be inflated by tactics; they want real information.
On the other side, you have marketing agencies who want their client to be in the forefront so they can be seen by everybody. Also a noble cause.
So it’s always this tension between marketers figuring out how to benefit their clients, and search engines working on making the marketer’s plans obsolete. [Read more…] about Clearing up Confusion About Bounce Rate
Build a Better Website: Part 3
Building a Better Website:
Is Blogging Marketing? Incorporate Strategy Everywhere
Once upon a time, HTML websites were the only professional looking websites available. They were costly, needed a lots of code, and were very unchangeable without paying for additional services provided solely by your website designer. They couldn’t be regularly updated with new material easily. Small companies with equally small marketing budgets were resigned to a static website that would be ‘it’ from then on.
Then WordPress came along and changed all that. Soon, web developers began to realize that their clients deserved much more that what a static HTML website could ever offer. Now WordPress websites make up around 15% of the total number of websites globally. That’s pretty big. [Read more…] about Build a Better Website: Part 3
Build a Better Website: Part 2
Building a Better Website:
Marketing Strategy Overview
In our first post in this series about website development, we covered 3 Things that Destroy Marketing and Strategy. Let’s go further and talk about some things that can be built right in that actually enhance your website’s ability to sell and help you become strategic in your efforts.
Give your website a voice
The tone of your site is important, but in this case I’m stressing the importance of your website actually having a voice, or ability to reach out to your viewer. Even in the best case scenario, unless visitors are already familiar with your products and services and returning to purchase, many times just reading a great blog post isn’t enough to bring them back. [Read more…] about Build a Better Website: Part 2
Build a Better Website: Part 1
Building a Better Website:
3 Things that Destroy Marketing and Strategy
Depending on the type of commerce your business deals with, your website needs will vary. There is no one-size fits all for complete website construction. There are a few things, however, that hamper even the most well-thought out plans when it comes to the performance your website needs to deliver … that is, if you want it to do more than cater to customers who already know about you. [Read more…] about Build a Better Website: Part 1
Local Business Reviews are Social Media, Too
After Google purchased Yelp in 2009, local business reviews became very significant. Although online marketers knew that comments and reviews are and have been beneficial for the business owner with an online presence, few others recognized how important those reviews actually were and will continue to be.
Why Should you Manage Your Local Business Reviews?
Local businesses should consider how reviews affect customer choice and loyalty. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and others give the customer an opportunity to voice their opinion – quite publicly – next to the business listing. Potential customers see what has been previously written and base their decisions on that information.
Local businesses need to actively encourage positive reviews. There is no way to erase a poor review, true or false. If you understand the importance of this side of social media, there are some things you should do to protect your brand. [Read more…] about Local Business Reviews are Social Media, Too