The post Is guest blogging dead or alive? SEO benefits, backlinks, Google PageRank and More! appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.
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Guest blogging is one of the best investments you can make towards promoting your online business. But why invest time, money, and effort into coming up with quality content for another person’s blog if you can spend it on your own? The idea of guest blogging may seem counter-intuitive to the way many have been brought up, but it is not.
Location! Location! Location! This concept is the easiest for everyone to understand. Getting more foot traffic can equal more customers and more customers can equal higher sales. Think of how the placement of a company in a busy mall can help sales. Hence the location of your business is critical when it comes to sales. In fact, when entrepreneurs locate a company in busy economic areas, they have a better chance to get sales. Therefore placing a good blog post on a busy blog will get your company noticed. And, if the post includes a link that sends quality traffic to your website that can be a huge bonus.
For those who are new to PageRank, it is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites. Google named PageRank after Larry Page, one of Google’s founders. PageRank is one way to measure the importance of website pages. Google counts the number and quality of links and citations to a page to determine the significance of a website. The assumption is that high-quality sites are likely to receive more links and excerpts from other websites.
Since Lawrence Page invented PageRank (PR) in 1998, millions have focused on getting it. This obsession is especially real for publishers and retailers who have adopted the Internet as their sole method for getting sales. Therefore if your business depends on the Internet for sales, you had better pay attention to PageRank.
For this reason, link building has been the focus of SEO efforts. And guest blogging has been one of the more successful approaches to link building.
The basic idea of guest blogging is to enter into a mutually-beneficial agreement with another webmaster. You provide quality content in exchange for a link back to your website. This trade is the basic idea of guest blogging in a nutshell. However, it gets more complicated because not all links have the same value. Furthermore, Google has expressed disapproval with large-scale guest blogging strategies as you will see.
Because it easy to create links, search engines came up with a way to stop people from manipulating search results. Google created a special “no follow” tag that needed to be part of the link when the link is a paid or non-editorial link. Google felt that only citation links or links that are part of the editorial content of a website matter for PageRank. Therefore the “no follow” tag told Google that the backlink had no authority and should not transfer PageRank.
Guest blogging links are typically not ordinary backlinks! We’re talking about a high-quality, “do follow” editorial backlink from an authority website. Bloggers can create backlinks that are an intricate part of the subject matter. In fact, backlinks are best when they support sticking points, facts or logical reasoning in a helpful blog post. They should not be part of some unnatural link building scheme or link exchange.
Natural backlinks are typically part of the main content in the primary area of a blog post. They are not some sidebar or a footer link. As most SEO experts will agree, backlinks placed somewhere towards the center of content are the best quality backlinks. Furthermore thinks that are in the navigation or sidebar of a website are placed in the same position on every page of a website. The odds of it being an advertisement or a paid link or are high.
This SEO value of backlinks is especially helpful if the domain they’re coming from has a lot of authority with search engines. The total number and quality of links that point to that website make up its authority value. Websites transfer that power to other sites when they link to them.
When webmasters place a link on a website, it usually includes a word in the description. Words like read more or click here are unhelpful. We are talking about the keywords that people search for to find your business. More often called a targeted keyword because we use them to describe or identify something. Therefore when webmasters or editors use keywords as the anchor, it tells search engines that the website to which you are linking is about that word.
Guest blogging, if done correctly, can be one of the most effective SEO strategies. The wrong approach can lead to opposite results. In some cases, Google will even go so far as to take action against your website if it has reason to believe you are running a link building scheme. Therefore you need to be careful not to promote a link exchange as a benefit to guest blogging.
Start by reading Google’s official position on guest blogging. Does this mean that small-scale article marketing or guest post campaigns are ok? What about links without keyword-rich anchor text? At what scale do guest blog posts become a link scheme. Google will not answer these questions because it will give too much information to spammers. The take away here is that Google leaves open options for Guest blogging on a limited scale. Therefore smart webmasters will want to take advantage of this opportunity.
Google is vigilant at identifying link schemes. If Google defines a pattern of behavior showing that you are exchanging links for something of value you will run into trouble. This situation will result in both your website and that of your guest bloggers will get penalized.
Back in 2014, Google’s SEO Executive Matt Cutts made a considerable post encouraging webmasters to stop using guest blogging as a means of getting backlinks.
The real reason why Cutts started an anti guest blogging campaign is that there were just too many spammy, automated type of guest blogging requests that found their way into the webmasters’ inboxes. The problem with this is that these were mailed out on a massive scale without any personalization whatsoever.
The auto-approve types of websites are even worse in the big picture. They are willing to accept all kinds of content, regardless of its (lack of) quality, and the backlinks are often pointing towards spammy affiliate websites with zero added value to the visitor. Now, it’s probably much easier to see why Google wasn’t exactly fond of it.
Simply put, Google isn’t against guest blogging per se, but they are against low-quality content and spamming. Some writers even tried to push this to the extreme by writing a single piece of material, then used various word spinners to mass produce variations of the same article that used different synonyms and trying to appear unique to the search engines. That way, they were able to game the system and only do the work once, gathering a ton of backlinks from their efforts. We strongly discourage this approach as it will lead to failure because Google is just too good at detecting these patterns of behavior.
Before you consider starting a Guest blogging, it is important to have substantial quality content and an attractive website. Thus you will want to focus on getting your website up to date and in good working order. If you write an excellent article for a highly trafficked site, they may hesitate to give you a backlink. After all, they will be sending their customers your way and, who wants to visit a poorly designed website with old outdated content and broken links? Furthermore, bloggers are looking for high-quality sites to place content. If your website does not look promising, then the return regarding direct traffic might not be worth the time investment.
One way to prevent your website from getting into a link exchange penalty is to Guest blog in exchange for a company citation. Google is now using references to your NAP (Name Address and Phone Number) as part of its algorithm for ranking websites. While it is not as powerful as a link, the number of times your company name, address and phone number are listed online will have an impact on both organic and local SEO.
Furthermore, as a guest blogger, you are promoting a brand. By getting your name and company cited as the author at the end of your article, you are relating the content to you and your company. Furthermore writing great articles will help you build an excellent reputation for you and your business.
Thus, if you’ve managed to pique the readers’ interest, they’ll be naturally inclined to find your website to learn more about your business. Therefore, guest blogging has some immediate traffic benefits, with or without the link to your website. Furthermore, if you’re guest blogging on the right websites, it’s also going to consist of highly-targeted individuals.
The way this can work is to have the blogger you are donating content to review your blog posts. If they find content that will enrich an article or inspire a new blog post, then they can use your website as a reference instead of making a direct link exchange. This approach shows Google that it was not a link exchange. Instead, your blogging partner reads an article on your website, and it helps inspire or provided facts needed for a topic they are covering.
The agreement can be, you will create content for a blogger. In return, they can spend some time reviewing content on your site. The goal of the review is to find articles to reference with an eye on improving the quality of both websites. Hence there is no direct link exchange or scheme involved in linking to your content. The purpose is to enhance the experience for visitors, and this is what Google wants webmasters to do most. Hence there is no clear profit motive for linking to your content.
Google’s guidelines are vague, but one thing is clear you need to go slow. Don’t jump into every guest blogging opportunity that comes around. If you do so, it could be part of an automated link scheme getting you in trouble. Learn more about your guest blog partner before you work with them. And only accept content from reputable sources. This reason is why the cleaning house step above needs to come first. If a website is worth your time investment, they should be doing the same evaluation of your site as you are theirs.
Start with the following tasks in evaluating possible guest blog opportunities:
– Review the content of sites you intend on being a guest blogger for and make sure they have nothing but quality content.
– Put their content through automated testing tools like Grammarly to see if there are excessive grammar or spelling issues
– Identify other backlinks to their content online and make sure they are on reputable websites.
– Make sure they are not stuffing content with too many redundant keywords
The evaluation described above is not done once and forgotten. After you agree to guest blog, you have entered into a long-term partnership. Future changes to your partner’s website and approach can impact your website. Therefore both websites need to continue to follow similar guidelines:
– Take great care in the way both sites are linking
– Don’t overstuff articles with links.
– Keep links organic and use quality sources.
– Avoid repetitive keyword anchor text links.
– Include some links without keyword-rich anchor text
– Don’t guest blog with websites in which you are not familiar.
– Check spelling and grammar, if there are a lot of mistakes you may want to pass.
– Place links in different places, not always at the end of posts and not on the same blogs. Differentiate and mix it up.
– Only work with blog partners that are relevant to your industry and write articles covering topics that are related to your website
Of course, the amount of traffic you’re going to get by piggybacking on other people’s websites depends on the daily amount of visitors they’re getting. If you’re going to be posting your articles on a relatively smaller niche blog, you can’t expect miraculous results. But it will undoubtedly help you in some way. Bear in mind that a small amount of high-quality traffic is always better than a heap-load of non-quality traffic.
For your efforts to bear fruit, it’s important to optimize all of your landing pages for conversion. That way, you can ensure that the maximum number of visitors will decide to become your customers and set yourself up for the best chances of success.
It’s probably not hard to guess that not every webmaster out there is going to be willing to accept your submission. This fact is especially true if you’re an unknown entity in your niche. Don’t let this discourage you from trying to get your articles published if you believe you’re genuinely doing your best to produce something worthy of reading.
More than anything else, it’s a numbers game. But don’t start spamming webmasters’ inboxes in hopes of getting a “yes.” It’s just not going to happen. Instead, you should take things slowly and message them one by one. Take the needed time to review their websites and structuring a coherent personalized proposal.
After a while, after your brand becomes recognized in the industry, you’re going to have an easier time getting approved. You may also see other people coming to you and asking you to be a guest blogger for them. Hence it’s easy to get things running after you’ve made a name for yourself in a given industry, although – admittedly – this can take quite a while to achieve.
You can use specialized search engines built for that purpose, or simply use the one you probably know best: Google! Using a simple formula such as the ones we’re going to outline, you can quickly and easily identify guest blogging opportunities in the important niches:
“[keyword]” + “write for us”
“[keyword]” + “guest blogging”
“[keyword]” + “contribute”
“[keyword]” + “writing opportunities”
And so on. You get the idea.
So no, guest blogging isn’t dead, at least not if you’re trying to generate authentic, well-researched, and high-quality content. If anything, it’s a triple win: you get a backlink or citation from an authority website, the webmaster gets excellent free content, and the search engines can index another article that’s designed to answer the search queries of their users. By doing it right, everyone wins.
Guest blogging, if done right, is as strong as ever. Why not start your own guest blogging efforts to get quality backlinks for your website. After all, quality guest bloggers are a positive force in the search engine ecosystem, and there’s no reason why this would change.
If you don’t have a blog yet or need some help getting started contact one of our marketing consultants at 978-851-9077. We are happy to help. You might also want to read this blogging guide: How to make a successful blog – 8 helpful Tips for first time bloggers
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]]>The post Build an audience of followers with free Facebook page likes appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.
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Once you’ve created a page on Facebook, the next logical step is to get free Facebook page likes and grow a following. Generally speaking, the more people that follow or like you on Facebook, the more exposure your business will get. After all, if no one sees your message, you’re probably not going to get sales, so it’s essential to build an audience of potential customers.
There are many things you can do to increase your following and get free likes on facebook. Often you can leverage the power of other online assets you’ve built to reach these goals. Today, we’re going to reveal some strategies you can use to create an audience by getting free likes on Facebook:
If you’re active on Facebook, chances are you’ve also established a personal profile that goes hand in hand with your brand. If you don’t mind associating your name with the name of your business, one easy way to get free likes is to connect the two. The simplest way to link your profile to your business page is to fill in the “work” category and drop a link to it your page.
Doing so is rather straightforward. Navigate to your page, find the “work and education” section, then select your business page as your place of employment. That’s all there is to it! Just make sure you set your Facebook page permissions to public, and you’re good to go.
Many feel asking your friends to like your Facebook business page is shameful. They believe it is necessary to earn likes and followers with quality posts, photos, videos, and content. It doesn’t count if you invite friends and family to like the page. It’s like asking your mother for a review. Of course, she will give you a good one, even if you just got out of jail for some federal crime.
While this may be true, I can’t think of a better reason why you need to ask friends to like your page. Likes are similar to reviews; we all look at them when considering if we should follow a page or not on Facebook. They are social proof that you are doing a good job. If you don’t have likes, it is harder to get likes and so on. So drop your ego and start asking your friends and family to like your page.
When you invite close friends and family to like your page, send it with a personal message. Include a plea to do you a personal favor to like your page. Make it a custom message, so they see you are sincere and not just sending out another dreaded mass email.
If you have ever run for office before or volunteered for a political campaign, you may have sent a dear friend card. It’s how friends invite friends to vote for public officials. This approach works wonders when the public official is a newbie without a tarnished reputation. This method also works with a new Facebook page. An invitation to like a Facebook page is just like a dear friend card.
The template could be as simple as:
Dear [insert name],
My friend [name] has just launched a Facebook page [page name] on [page topic].
I know that the page will have fantastic videos, photos, and posts covering [page topic]. Also, please consider trying the services and or products that they are offering at [insert your company name and location] Unlike the competition, they are community focused and want to make a difference. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Your Friend
John Doe
Most business owners also have a website that’s receiving search engine traffic. Why not take advantage of this to get free Facebook page likes well?
The most convenient way of doing this is to add a Facebook “like” button to every piece of content you post. That way, your visitors will be able to “like” your content without ever needing to leave your website.
If your working with a web designer that uses WordPress, getting free likes on your Facebook page is easy to do. Just install Jetpack for WordPress and enable the Facebook Like box widget. Complete your options. Features include whether or not you want to show faces, message stream, and your total likes. Then place the widget in a sidebar, homepage or other visible section of your web pages.
Essentially, by putting a like button on your website, you are killing two birds with one stone. Not only is your Facebook page going to receive additional likes, but you’re also going to be adding the much-needed social proof.
Consider this approach for sign-up forms, login pages, thank you pages, footers of your email messages and so on. Once you start getting free Facebook page likes, you can determine which is the best approach for your business.
By being active on forums and online discussions, you’re establishing yourself as an expert in your niche. This marketing strategy is useful for promoting your business because you are helping others. People typically appreciate being supported and will almost always return the favor? Why not use this to bring more attention to your Facebook page.
Furthermore, if you make a significant contribution, you will be liked and respected within the community. Other users will be naturally inclined to want to learn more about you and your business. As a result, it will increase the chances of them becoming your Facebook followers.
Sometimes it is not enough to be helpful and give quality advice. Even if you do, people may not automatically search for your Facebook page and give you a “like.” You will need to ask for the like. So don’t forget to ask users to like your Facebook page after you have helped them out or at the end of a great forum post.
Perhaps this section deserves a dedicated article, but just to cover the main idea here, it’s important to mention that your followers typically come to you looking for one thing in particular: high-quality content. It should be relevant and tailored to your audience’s interests (also regarding age groups, education, etc.) Read this Tips for first-time bloggers article for more on creating helpful content.
Whenever you decide to post a new article on your page, you should also make a post about it on the Facebook page (and other social media if you’re using it). This technique will give them a reason to keep an eye on what you’re doing, and if your content is fantastic, they’ll share it with their friends too (however, asking them to do it doesn’t hurt either).
Now, don’t limit yourself by posting the content you’ve created exclusively. While this should be a part of the overall equation, linking to content that others have written, as long as it’s relevant and well-written, will motivate your followers to keep coming back for more. After all, your knowledge, personality, and good taste are the main reasons why they’ve decided to become your followers in the first place.
If you run out of ideas on what to post, it doesn’t hurt to check what your competitors are doing. The important thing to grasp here is that you shouldn’t create the same posts or link to the same articles. Instead, try to dig deeper into the topic or put your unique spin on things.
Hence reviewing the competition lets you get a general feel for what they’re feeding their followers. If you see it helps them, do something similar, but always put a unique spin on things.
Adopt the mindset that growing your Facebook audience is a marathon and not a sprint. You are unlikely to achieve massive results overnight. However, if you work on increasing your Facebook followers and likes slowly and steadily, good results are bound to follow.
The catch is to focus on things that work and leaving everything else behind. After all, social media marketing requires some serious work and dedication on your part. In fact, many business owners decide to outsource the social media management part of their business, either because they don’t have the time to do it or because they prefer to be doing other things.
It is essential to stick to a schedule and post something at least a couple of times a week. It could end up never getting done if you do it whenever time allows you. In any case, just make sure that the quality of what you post doesn’t diminish merely because of time constraints.
Finally, don’t forget to focus on the people who share similar interests. If you are networking or engaging in online discussions to promote your business, you need to target the right audience. Your time is well-spent if you’re addressing the right type of people (in other words, those who are interested in what you have to say).
Hopefully, you’ve learned a couple of tricks on building an audience on Facebook. After this is taken care of and you’re reasonably satisfied with the results, it’s important not to rest on your laurels and keep on going with what’s brought you this far. After all, fans, followers, and potential prospects are the lifeblood of every thriving business.
Once you have mastered marketing on Facebook with one page you might want to look at the benefits of getting more than one Facebook page.
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]]>The post 10 Tips on Hiring SEO Consultants for Your Law Firm appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.
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If you own a law firm and are looking for SEO consultants, this article will give you a broad overview of SEO strategy and implementation. To make it an easy read we have outlined ten points including advice on search engine optimization (SEO), blogging and reputation management to squash or mute those negative reviews.
If you keep on reading, we’re going to share an SEO strategy with you that doesn’t take too long to implement but has the power of increasing your click-through rates by 30%!
Here is what the best SEO Consultants for Lawyers should know to improve your online presence:
Do you know which keywords your customers are using to find you? For lawyers, this sounds like an easy task, but the English language with all its nomenclatures can make things complicated. Let’s start with the name of your profession. Are you a lawyer or attorney? How many people use them interchangeably? Don’t forget barristers, solicitors, advocates, and counselors all are used to describe the legal profession, but most people in the US will use either lawyer or attorney to find you, but which one should you use when writing content? Fortunately, most modern search engines like Google have already made adjustments for this, so if your SEO consultants are worried about the difference, they have not been paying much attention to search engine marketing trends.
Google updated its algorithm with Hummingbird in 2013 to take the guesswork out of the meaning of a user’s search, so you don’t have to worry about stuffing keywords anymore. However, you will need to consider more conversational queries—specifically those used in voice search. SEO Consultants should start targeting phrases that begin with “Who, How, Why and Where” as these will prove beneficial towards SEO. For example: “How do I know if my SEO consultants are doing their job?” We hope this article will help answer that question.
Most attorneys are specialized, whether it be in the field of insurance claims, business law, injury settlements or divorces. Your website’s content probably already reflects your specialized services. Hence you have already started the process of narrowing the focus of your message for search engines.
Consider also that you are licensed to do business in a particular region. For this reason, you will need to focus your efforts on local SEO. If you are too busy to take this on, it may make sense to hire local SEO Consultants. Read this article on Local SEO before you decide on which direction to take.
First, an example of a global keyword: “lawyer with affordable rates.”
While this keyword may get a lot of searches, it may not be the most cost-effective. Millions of lawyers target broad keywords and end up wasting a lot of money in the process.
With this approach, you’re optimizing your website for search terms that are too broad, and this is not the most efficient use of your time and marketing resources. Furthermore, customers would be contacting you from areas in which you are not licensed to work anyway. Unless you have a network of lawyers globally, this will end up costing you money without adding to your bottom line.
Take a look at this highly targeted local keyword instead:
“divorce lawyer in Boston.”
Immediately, the difference is apparent. This type of keyword may get less monthly searches, but for Boston area lawyers it is a more realistic target. Also, those who search for this term are more accessible. You can meet with them quickly, and they can be easier to convert into customers. Your customers or friends may know them, and it will be easier to make a personal connection. Furthermore, you’re offering the service they need in the area they reside.
While location-based keywords are essential for your website’s organic rank, these Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) will usually get pushed down by local results including local directories, maps, and customer reviews.
While there are thousands of local directories out there, only a handful are driving all the traffic. We recommend focusing on these websites for Local Search and Reviews:
Getting your business listed in local directories is easy but ranking well in local results requires a commitment of time and resources. You will want to make sure your listings are consistent, accurate and as complete as possible. Variations in your company name, phone number and or address can make a difference in how search engines perceive and rank you in local search results.
Keep your listings regularly updated with photos, posts and quality content and you will see the best results. Lawyers benefit from having an updated profile in major local directories like Google My Business and Yelp because they dominate the traffic for most online local searches.
Search engines love structured data because it helps them deliver answers to many search queries without users needing to click through and visit a website. Did you know that by implementing structured data, your click-through rates in the search engines get increased by around 30%?
Your website will be rewarded with higher click-through rates because you took the extra effort to make your content more accessible by making it structured. But before you can do this you need to identify the structured data on your website.
Structured data may improve your local search results.
The most apparent structured data on almost every Lawyer’s website is the physical location of your firm. Search engines will know exactly who and where you are if you identify the name, address and phone number of your business as structured data. (for example, in the ‘contact us’ section, you can ask your programmer to highlight your office locations as structured data).
By using structured data to combine your company name with your contact information, it creates an additional location based signal for search engines. Although it is not official, Google will likely announce schema as a ranking factor for its local search algorithm.
Face to face marketing is one of the most effective ways to win new clients. Many lawyers recognize this and hold educational workshops or networking events for local chambers or business associations. Your website can use structured data to highlight the “event” with a “date,” “cost,” and “venue,” and this helps search engines to answer specific questions about that event when people are searching for it.
Government organizations have no incentive to add structured data to a website because there is no profit motive. For those who depend on search traffic to grow their business, this is a welcome opportunity.
If there are dates that new state or local laws are going to take effect, they are a meaningful event about which people will be searching. Your site could rank well if you use schema to identify the event details including when the change will happen.
For example, if you are a Massachusetts lawyer you should follow the Official Massachusetts Trial Court Law Updates Blog. This blog is an excellent resource for current changes to Massachusetts law. We tested the blog’s content with Google’s Structured data testing tool and did not find any structured data. However, the content on the blog is full of unstructured data that can be tagged, structured and reformatted for your website. Thus this can be a good strategy when coupled with good advice and tips on accommodating the change.
Most Lawyers have already written educational articles and publications, so this structured data opportunity should be an easy win. Many lawyers don’t know is that the content they have already written is rich with Structured data. Therefore you will want to let Google know your page contains legal articles or news publications by identifying the headline, image, publisher, author name, date of publication that help inform searchers.
Additional structured data opportunities include social media profiles and reviews. For more information on implementing structured data, please read our article: “All you need to know about Structured Data, Schema, SERPs, Rich Knowledge Boxes, Snippets and more.”
Every good legal website needs a blog. By blogging about changes in the law, especially those that are currently in the news, you’re going to attract visitors to your website. People will be searching for these topics in Google, and if your SEO consultants have done their job, they’re going to be using the search terms in the content of your article.
By having relevant, optimized, quality content posted on your website, you’re accomplishing two things: you’re feeding the search engines the type of material they’re hungry for while positioning yourself as an expert in the niche. For more on blogging read “How to make a successful blog – 8 helpful Tips for first-time bloggers.”
To get the most out of the articles you post, consider using a revised version for traditional media like the local newspapers and don’t forget to get the word out on social media.
SEO rankings are something that needs to be planned, achieved and maintained, and to do this you need to follow some basic SEO principles. For starters, your keywords need to be present in the following areas of your website:
To fully optimize your site several additional technical elements need attention including:
Google has been on a performance binge lately where it has created a variety of tools that make it possible for developers and non-technical users to audit the performance of a website. You can bet if Google invested in tools to improve your site it is also going to reward you for using them, and that is what it has been doing.
Examples of Google website optimization tools include:
Recently Google introduced Lighthouse for developers. This combined several of these website optimization tools into one comprehensive resource for testing web applications and websites. This Google tool is one that your web developer should be using and one about which your SEO Consultants should know.
Moving on to the offsite SEO, this mostly has to do with gaining backlinks to your website from relevant, quality sources. Again, we’re also just briefly touching upon it, since this topic requires a separate article to be appropriately covered (or even a whole book).
Just a final word on blackhat SEO consultants: don’t even think about using them. While they may look appealing, because they promise quick results, the cold hard truth is that the effects are usually not long-lasting, and in the long term, this type of SEO methodology will do you more harm than good.
Social media presence goes beyond gaining quality backlinks to your website (but they are indeed a part of the package). In essence, social media pages are an opportunity for you to establish a deeper, more personal connection with your audience. Through which potential customers can also come to you with questions you can answer. By making this connection and being responsive, you are going to gain their trust, which may very well be enough to tip the scales of them doing business with you.
Also, every time you post something new on your blog, you can even let your customers and followers know about it by posting it on your social media channels. Not only does it act as a high-quality social backlink to your website, but it also brings the content closer to the eyes of your readers.
Never settle for a cheap-looking website. As a lawyer, you need to be a living and breathing example of professionalism; someone your clients can trust. Therefore, caring about your professional image must be at the forefront of your overall marketing strategy.
Not only does your website need to have a good design, but it also needs to be easy to navigate. In reality, you just have a couple of seconds to convince the visitors that they’ve come to the right place, and you cannot afford to lose a moment of their attention. Often, they’re not even going to read the content, merely skim over it, and decide on a whim whether you’re trustworthy or not. So you need to make the few seconds of their attention count.
No matter what you’re doing and how much you’re trying to appeal to the search engines, the end goal of your website should be to convert the visitors into customers. After all, your site is the most critical sales representative you have, and it’s working for you 24/7, winning you clients even while you sleep.
To this end, you should make sure that you have an industry professional write the sales copy. After all, the content must serve the end goal of bringing in new customers. If you don’t get new business, then you are just paying to host a website without the rewards that should come with it.
Getting great reviews on Yelp and Google My Business is crucial, since customers may check the online reviews before doing business with you. Furthermore, search engines are looking for ways to improve the customer experience, and online reviews are one measurement for separating good lawyers from bad. Online reviews have been a ranking factor in the algorithm of most major search engines. Therefore your placement in search results will depend, in part, on your reputation and online reviews.
The three most visible review platforms are Google My Business, Facebook, and Yelp. Since both Google and Facebook allow you to ask customers for reviews and Facebook lets you turn the review feature off altogether, the most challenging out of the three appears to be Yelp. We will focus on Yelp.
If someone has given you a bad review on Yelp, do not engage in a fight with that person. Instead, use your legal skills and your knowledge of Yelp’s policies to see if there are other, more efficient ways of getting bad reviews removed.
For example, when the person leaving the review violates Yelp’s terms of service, including comments that include the following:
You can message the website’s administrators and report it. If the review contains any of the above, it’s usually pretty simple to get it removed. But even if that is not the case, there is still plenty of hope. For example, if you have enough information to identify them, you may want to consider contacting the reviewer offline and convince them to remove the bad review. After all, being a lawyer, this should be right up your alley.
Even though Yelp isn’t fond of business owners asking for reviews, you can still do it if you’re smart enough to fly under the radar. Although Yelp discourages the practice, the most straightforward way of getting good reviews is just asking the customers you know you’ve provided an excellent service for, to leave you a good review. If nothing else, they’ll be more inclined to do it as a way to express their gratitude. And besides, Yelp has no way of knowing you asked for these reviews.
As you can see, the best way of getting high reviews for your Yelp listing is to provide an excellent service. Admittedly, this is harder to do at the beginning where you’re starting from scratch, but it gets easier after you get the ball rolling.
But no matter what you do, you should not mass email your email list, asking them for reviews. Yelp engineered its algorithms to easily spot this, and consequently disregard these reviews entirely, rendering your efforts meaningless.
The final tip we’re going to share is that you need to respond to both good and bad reviews. We’ve already gone over why you just cannot remain passive when it comes to dealing with bad reviews (they can do your business some serious harm), but responding to the positive ones may not be an obvious path to take.
But if you take the time to respond kindly to everyone who has taken their time to leave you a great review, you’re coming across as someone who’s kind and compassionate and genuinely wants what’s best for the customer. Also, this is a free opportunity for you to turn the review into an educational moment. Whether you are letting customers and the world know about a new service offering or benefit of working with your firm, take this opportunity as a win-win.
When you hire SEO consultants, you need to know how to evaluate their performance against standard industry practices. This article will guide you in making the decision and managing that relationship. You need to know about many things to be a good lawyer, and the same goes for running a successful legal practice. SEO and online marketing are one of those areas that are critical to success.
Feel free to contact our Boston SEO Consultants for a free website review. Call 978-851-9077
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If you are wondering how to make a successful blog this is the right place to start. There are a lot of blogs on the Internet. When we create a piece of content, we’re competing for readers with a half dozen other sources, whether we’re writing news articles, blog tips, or creating product reviews.
On top of that, not all blog posts are created equal. Your blog writing style will affect how readers perceive you and whether they stick around, but so will your use of images and the way your articles are structured.
The good news is that if you get it right, you’ll reap the rewards regarding the search engine traffic that it brings in and the conversions it creates. After all, helpful blog posts are always SEO friendly because they develop backlinks and lead to engaged website visitors. Nothing pleases Google more than content that is helpful. Blog posts are especially useful if they use structured data, which allows Google to display answers without users having to click through and visit your website. Websites that publish quality structured data like recipes, reviews and events are quickly becoming trendsetters.
Creating a successful blog can also have a significant impact on your bottom line if you get your call-to-action right. But how do you write a helpful blog post in the first place? It’s time to find out.
If you are uncertain where to start, you might want to think about your interests. As a blog owner, you will be the one who needs to keep creating content and promoting your blog. Therefore, you won’t put in the necessary effort required to make your blog a success unless you have a keen interest in the subject matter. If your goal is to make money, you might want to consider creating a coupon blog. People like saving money. Helping people save, is one of those things that will keep them coming back.
How to make a successful blog starts with evergreen content. Evergreen content remains relevant over time, and this means that you’re likely to continue to see returns from it in the months and years to come. From a traditional publishing point of view, evergreen content tends to take the form of interviews, opinion pieces and features rather than breaking news stories. The good news is that if you’re trying to be helpful by creating tutorials and other how-to content, it’s likely to be evergreen by default.
The most helpful blog posts have clear headings that list actionable tips, like this one. That allows readers to skim read articles if needed and it also provides them with a checklist of sorts against which they can check their progress. Actionable tips work great whether you’re giving instructions on building a DIY project or talking about something less tangible, such as offering marketing advice.
Images are useful for breaking up big chunks of text and for illustrating complex topics, so it’s a good idea to use them where possible to bring your blogs to life. Images are particularly relevant if your subject is tricky to explain in words, but you can describe the process through an image, a GIF or a video. Imagine explaining to someone how to tie their shoelaces, for example. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier actually to show them? When you’re using images correctly, they become such a fundamental part of your blog posts that your content has little impact without them. Check out this article for “A Brief Guide to Creating Viral-Ready Images.”
Make sure that you have software like Google Analytics installed on your website so that you can see what visitors are doing. Keep an eye on which posts are being visited most often, as well as how long people are spending on the page and what action they’re taking next. You can then start to identify common themes amongst the top performers. You can then choose this and apply it to new articles to increase their chances of success.
One way to find out what people find helpful is to ask them. If you have an active audience then why not consider deploying a survey or posting updates on your social media profiles to ask people what they want? By getting an overall idea of what people are looking for, you can increase the likelihood of them finding your blog posts useful. After all, the best way to cater to your audience is to give them exactly what they want.
No matter how good you believe you are, you’ll never stop learning and improving. That’s why you should go out of your way to continually try new things to see how your audience responds. An iterate approach involves using different content types such as audio and video on top of your written content, and it also means testing out new formats such as interviews and Q&As as well as reviews and guest posts.
An article on how to make a successful blog would not be complete without white hat SEO strategies. It is one thing to create helpful blog posts, and it is another to have them found. Unless your website already has a reputation for producing helpful blog posts and has a ton of links from other sites sending it traffic, you’ll need to consider “white hat” SEO strategies.
First, make sure you have written your post with the right keywords in all the right places. Use Google’s keyword planning tool as a guide. Next, you need to work on improving the rank of your page. Improving PageRank means getting websites that publish quality content to cite your company and link to your post. Getting high-quality, relevant backlinks from sites that have a reputation for quality content and are on topic is not an easy task, but you can achieve it by employing white hat SEO strategies or hiring an SEO consultant. Finally, make sure your content follows Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Read our article to learn how guest blogging strategies can help: Is guest blogging dead or alive? SEO benefits, backlinks, Google PageRank and More!
Writing a helpful blog post doesn’t have to be difficult. If you manage to get the balance right then, you’ll continue to reap the rewards for the months and years to come. Blog posts are particularly helpful when they are evergreen and don’t become outdated over time. But even with the time-sensitive material, you can always go back in and update it at a later date if it becomes super popular.
Following our tips on how to make a successful blog is a good start if you want to be as helpful as possible, but ultimately it’s your readers who have the final say. Pay attention to their feedback and make changes to your approach if necessary to give them what they want. Don’t forget to plan out your white hat SEO strategy for each post and you’ll be bringing in the traffic in no time. Good luck.
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In today’s article, we answer the most common plugin-related questions you might have and provide some helpful tips.
Without plugins, the core functionality of WordPress would be severely limited. It’s thanks to them that the platform has managed to take off so well. At the given time, you choose from well over 40-thousand plugins (both free and commercial), all of which serve various purposes.
Furthermore, even average webmasters can use them to improve their website without writing a single line of code. For example, just by using a simple WordPress plugin, you can transform your website into an e-commerce store or a private membership hangout. Some of them make your front-page look beautiful, and others add functionality in the background. The possibilities are nearly endless.
Some plugins introduce too many lines of code into the script. For example, Javascript and multiple CSS files. The additional code can cause render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content and cause a delay in rendering your web pages. Some plugins are worse offenders than others, but the more you have installed, the more time your website is going to take to load.
The reason being is that every plugin needs to send an HTTP or database query to the server at one point or another. Therefore, disabling or uninstalling the plugins you no longer need is considered to be a good practice, since you’re going to reduce the strain on the server. You can try to defer or asynchronously load blocking resources, or inline the critical portions of those resources directly in the HTML. If you don’t know what this means consider hiring a programmer who can optimize the scripts for you.
The fact of the matter is that individual developers abandon their projects after a while, which means no more security updates. Not updating your plugins can introduce potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Since the plugins are no longer officially supported, other types of problems may occur, like stability problems.
There’s no need to worry over every WordPress plugin you decide to install. For example, any number of plugins that’s below 20, is still considered to be acceptable. This figure is just a ballpark estimate, and if you happen to have slightly more, there’s no need to worry.
It’s not (solely) about the number, it’s about the choices you make. Quality is more important than quantity.
Admittedly, making a right call on which plugins are poorly coded and which ones are not, is a bit hard to make for someone who doesn’t know how to code. However, by reading the webmaster forums and Googling for answers, it’s relatively easy to find the answers pretty quickly.
WordPress programmers are supposed to follow the same WordPress coding standards, but they don’t typically communicate with each other during development. This situation brings up the possibility of naming convention conflicts in coding. Multiple plugins might listen when your website is executing scripts. WordPress Plugins can stop working and even make your site crash. Therefore, the potential for problems will increase when more than one web designer is creating code. Your costs of debugging and troubleshooting will grow with each new plugin you install. For this reason, a minimalist approach is the best approach to WordPress Plugins.
If you are experimenting with WordPress plugins, the chances are that you have more than one plugin installed with the same functionality. You’re making sure there is no excess clutter on your website by making a choice and removing either one or the other.
It’s important to wait a couple of days before each plugin installation and not try to add too many at once. By installing each one individually, you can see how each plugin performs and determine whether it causes a slowdown in your website’s loading time. Use online testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. If you had used the plugins before and trusted them, well then go for it.
Some people think that updating their WordPress core is enough, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Keeping your website as secure requires that you take care of your WordPress plugins by ensuring they are regularly updated. Then hackers will have a harder time exploiting a previously-patched vulnerability to compromise your website.
Your choice regarding which plugins to install is more important than the sheer number of them you have. Your task is trying your best to avoid installing the poorly-coded ones. Generally speaking, installing plugins from well-known developers is a lot less risky than installing the relatively unknown ones.
By doing this, you will improve the speed of your website as well as make yourself less susceptible to hacks and exploits.
You can view when a plugin was last updated within your WordPress dashboard as this type of information is publicly displayed.
Perform updates on a clone of your production site Check your site thoroughly and identify any offending plugins. If one crashes your site or causes problems, you can wait to make upgrades to that plugin. Once you are 100% satisfied all your features and functionality are working properly it is safe to perform updates to your live website.
If every plugin can potentially make your site slower and less secure, how can you know you’re on the right path? Simply put, you’re going to have to accept that no matter what you do, your website will never be able to have all the positives without negatives. Such a thing is just impossible to achieve in real-life situations.
M you make healthy choices and test thoroughly. Plugins can yield significant payoffs concerning the benefits of added functionality to your website. If you feel like installing a plugin will help your site, then – by all means – go for it!
From here on and onward, it’s also about setting specific goals and priorities. What is more important: security, fast loading times, or functionality? Answering this question will point you towards the correct path of developing your website in the future.
Conclusion: Plugin Overload Dilemma
By following these simple principles we’ve discussed above, you’ll be on your way towards a faster, more secure, and a more reliable website and your carefully-chosen WordPress plugins.
NH Web Design can provide custom web design, WordPress development and managed web hosting services for those who want to have a worry-free WordPress website. Contact us for a quote on your next project.
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]]>The post Five Branding Strategies for Small Businesses to Adopt In 2019 appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.
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Photo by Denis Lomme from Pexels
If you have a small business, you’re definitely not alone. Small businesses make up the majority of all business in the United States. And in New Hampshire, especially, small businesses are nearly 96% of all small businesses, with almost one hundred fifty thousand small businesses operating, according to the most recent statistics from the Small Business Association.
With all that competition, how do you keep your business in the limelight?
One of the key factors is effective branding.
Branding is important for every business, regardless of the size. Not only that, but it can help to actually change the size of your business, helping you to grow beyond your initial goals and keep reaching forward.
But branding isn’t a static thing. It needs to grow and change along with your business itself.
Here are five effective branding strategies to consider for your own small business this year.
This may seem like a tall order. After all, there’s no 100% surefire guarantee that video content will actually go viral. Sometimes it seems completely random, like a lightning strike.
But the fact is that you need video content in order to even have a chance at going viral. And another fact is that video content is in high demand; statistics say that up to 54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands that they already support.
“Create more video” may not seem like a marketing strategy on the face of it. But if your company isn’t outputting any video at all, releasing video content could have a big impact on how your brand is perceived.
Not only is video one of the best ways to get, and keep, the attention of the customer, it also lends itself to being talked about and shared with others.
So interesting, well-produced, useful, entertaining, and funny video content can easily put a new “face” on your brand.
You don’t have to be an expert with video editing in order to make effective videos, either. Whether you want a polished look or a quaint, hand-made feel, it’s more about the accessibility and entertainment value of the content than the actual production.
A hot current trend with branding is the minimalist approach. It’s pretty common for a brand to plaster their logo at every available opportunity. And it’s good for your viewers to know who you are.
But a minimalist approach to branding is more about letting your content and your products speak for themselves.
Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels
Rather than relying on your logo only or your company name, pick a feature of your brand: a color or color combination, typeface, graphic style, or even a shape or silhouette, to be the representative of your brand.
This approach may take some time to build up to true effectiveness in terms of brand recognition, but in the long run it can do a lot to direct attention to what you actually do, rather than just your shiny logo. And that direction communicates effectively what the benefit is to your customer.
Google is a great example of rotating design, with their logo that cycles through new designs throughout the weeks.
Each different logo, though, is still readily identifiable as the Google logo. And here’s the challenge with a rotating design branding strategy: each piece of design still has to “fit” with your brand.
You don’t need to rotate every aspect of your brand, but cycling through different logo designs and color combinations can keep things fresh.
When done well, rotating design can capture and keep the attention of your customers, leading to a deeper investment and engagement.
It also gives your brand a playfulness and personality that can be really useful in terms of making personal connections with consumers.
These last two branding strategies are some of the most effective ways to up your brand game.
Customer-created content heightens the amount of engagement from the customer, simply because they are contributing to the brand with their own actions and words.
Marketing campaigns are often built around customer-created content. Even something as simple as asking to be hashtagged on Instagram, or offering a prize for the most creative selfie with one of your products, can stimulate engagement.
Photo by bruce mars from Pexels
Inviting experiences and open conversation give your brand accessibility, which is always a great contributor to a reputation as a customer service oriented business. This is especially effective in a smaller community, where your neighbors and friends are often your customers.
Along the same lines, employee generated content is a great way to heighten your brand’s accessibility. When your employee says something good about your company, it means more than if you, as the owner, are tooting your own horn.
Employee engagement can greatly affect customer engagement.
Allow your employees the chance to create content for your website or your social media. Let them tell their own stories and experiences. Do Q and A sessions with your employee of the month.
Let your employees be real people to your customers, and your brand will become real along with it.
It may take more than one of these branding strategies to really make your small business all that it can be. It may take more than all of them together!
The more time and effort you are willing to put into your branding, the more successful it will be.
The great thing about these strategies is that it puts personality into your brand. And that’s really what a brand is all about: what your company would look like, sound like, be like, if it were a real person.
Companies, just like people, can’t afford to be static. We always have to keep growing and changing in order to stay alive. The strategies outlined here are designed to help your own small business thrive.
Brianna Jensen is a content specialist who curates, writes and promotes content for online businesses. Connect with her to discover a world of content types, fit for your organizational needs.
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]]>The post 12 web design trends to help plan a new website or website redesign appeared first on New Hampshire Web Design.
]]>A regular website redesign should be part of the marketing budget of every successful company. Sometimes, it can feel impossible to keep up with the latest web design trends! This propensity for change especially applies to new website design, as capabilities and standards are always being refined and advanced to create a better overall user experience. Chances are if your website hasn’t been updated and redesigned in the last few years, it probably needs an overhaul.
If that’s the case, you’re likely seeing the impacts of failing to update your website every few years. Your traffic may not be where you’d like it to be, and those who visit your site may be choosing not to follow through with your services. While a website redesign is not a fix-all, it can help increase traffic and business, as your site will be more search engine friendly, and accessible.
A website redesign can be a simple process, or a much more detailed one, depending on the last time your website was updated. You may need to update your content management system’s software and the images on your site, or you may need to overhaul your entire website. If it has been more than five years since you updated your site, chances are, there are some significant changes to be made. You will want to make sure your website is using the latest web design trends. That your site looks clean and modern, works with mobile devices, modern browsers, and is secure. If that is not the case, your company should be considering investing in a website redesign.
In 2019, with the web developing at an incredibly fast rate, keeping your website updated with the latest web design trends is crucial to your company’s success online. Planning your website redesign should be part of the annual marketing strategy. You will want to spend time doing research and budgeting for that next major website upgrade. It can take three months to a year to redesign a website, you need to plan your next website redesign continuously, or it is easy to get outdated.
At a minimum, once a year you should get a stylistic refresh to keep your website looking new and fresh. A stylistic update can include minor modifications to colors, graphics, and adjustments to the styles and theme of your website. This update could be an affordable option if your website were designed using industry standards for web development, including responsive coding, CSS, and clean HTML. If not, you might need to scrap your site for a full redesign.
We recommend that you consider redesigning and developing your website every two years to keep up with the latest web design trends. This is because web technology changes rapidly, and you want your website to maintain its competitive advantage and stay secure.
Here are the top five most obvious signs that your website is failing and you probably need a total website redesign:
If you are experiencing any of the symptoms above, then read on for a complete overview. As a bonus, you will learn 12 web design trends that will help you create a shopping list of features for your next website.
Remember, a redesign might not mean replacing your site and starting over, but instead, it could mean updating the content, colors, and graphics. Unless the software, and code are unfit for modern devices, browsers and fail to comply with current industry standards. Therefore, if you built your website with a modern codebase, a web design firm can take it over and enhance it for your potential customers.
You will want to create a request for proposal that fits your needs and business requirements. In doing so, you will either ask for a redesign or a refresh. Next, we will cover several features and web design trends that modern websites are using, and it will help you decide which direction to take.
The longer people must wait for a web page to load, the more likely they are to leave the page and head to a competitor’s page. People abandon 40% of websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. Therefore, one of the improvements you will want to make is to increase the speed of your site to prevent users from heading to a competitor who might have a faster website.
Your goal should be to have a website that outperforms your competitors in terms of speed. That way, if your site also ranks well, you will receive excellent traffic overall. Likely, an increase in traffic will lead to positive business conversions. Test the speed of your current site today by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights testing tool.
If you updated your website within the past few years, it is likely up-to-par with web design trends and industry standards for website speed. If it has been a while since you updated your website, now is as good a time as any. You should focus efforts on upgrading it for speed and performance. If you do nothing, you will lose visitors, and your company will lose credibility. In general, you should want your website to be as fast as possible, as people will leave if it is not up to par with the competition.
Optimizing your website for voice search has become one of the hottest web design trends. Voice searches have increased from the popularity of home speakers like Alexa, Google, Cortana, and Siri. This fact has put the importance of structured data front and center for web developers. Structured data is content on sites that have been marked up with code that search engines can quickly scan and read. Therefore, voice search assistants, such as Alexa, can browse through structured data rapidly to provide answers to people who ask common questions. Unstructured data, including text and HTML, is less helpful since computers have difficulty identifying essential details.
While structured data is not all that new, if your website has not been designed or redesigned in the past couple of years, you are likely missing out. With the popularity of voice search machines, you want your business and its site results to be the top results for those systems to use.
You will also notice that search engines are displaying enhanced search results (SERPs) on the top of your browser. This feature comes in various styles and forms, including featured snippets, knowledge cards, top stories, and knowledge graphs. If your website us well written and uses structured data, there is a higher likelihood that it will display in a search engine enhanced SERPs.
A website redesign should include structured data. It is not difficult to add to your site and can be very influential in the success of your website when it comes to enhanced SERPs. Note that structured data does not guarantee that your pages will rank high in search engine results. Quality content is still the most critical factor for search engine optimization (SEO)
Over the last few years, Google has been focusing on making the web a more secure place. That is, since 2018, they have been marking all HTTP websites as not safe. The message warns visitors that HTTP websites make them vulnerable to malware and hacking. Google Chrome is now warning users when they are entering a site that is not secure. Google’s goal is to stop consumers from using websites that could lead to a leak of private information. If this happens to your website, it may be something that can be fixed easily by installing an SSL Certificate. This warning may also be a sign that you have been hacked and need a more substantial website redesign.
Updating security is crucial to making sure that people trust and rely on your website. Therefore, a web designer can help set up an SSL certificate to encrypt your data and add the needed security to your site. If you are not sure if your website is secure, there are free online tools that will test the security of your site. Google has a tool called Lighthouse, which is used by developers to improve web pages. This tool will let you know if your website is using HTTP or HTTPS.
Previously, only sites that had e-commerce capabilities were pushed to secure their websites to prevent financial information from being leaked to hackers. However, private information is all over the Internet, in many forms. Security your site is now a web design trend for all websites. If you don’t make your website secure, it could affect your ability to get traffic and keep your customer and business safe.
Once you get people to your site, you want to be able to keep them there, as well! To do this, you will need to focus on web design trends for usability and accessibility. Having a responsive website is one way you can achieve this goal. If it is responsive, people trying to reach your site from any device can do so easily. If mobile users can contact your site but are unable to navigate it easily, then you are going to lose business and credibility. In 2019, it is necessary that you make your website accessible to people on all devices. If it is not, you will want to redesign it as soon as possible, as mobile use accounts for 50.3% of all web traffic. Don’t miss out on double the potential customers!
Not only do you want your site to be responsive to different devices, but it should also work well in various browsers. Don’t be shocked to learn that your website is not working on newer browsers if you created your website a decade ago using Netscape. You will want to test it using Edge, Explorer, Safari, Chromium, Chrome, and other modern browsers. A website redesign of an older site will likely include restructuring the software for different browsers, which is essential today. There are many modern browsers in use, and your website should look good on all of them.
Maybe the most exciting part of a website redesign is the visible changes, including redesigning the old graphics to an updated and modern feel. People will not want to stay on your website if it looks boring and feels old. Part of any redesign should be to make the site look as clean and professional as possible.
One example of updating that would be necessary is if your site is still using Adobe Flash. Ever since Apple blocked users from viewing Flash animation on millions of I-phones in 2008 due to security, its usage went downhill. Many other companies also followed suit. Developers and designers stopped using flash. If your site is using flash, you would need to find an alternative for animation like HTML5 or JavaScript that works across systems today. The aesthetic of your website is just as important as its functionality. Therefore we feel both are important to the success of your redesign.
Over the last decade, the Internet has developed rapidly, and often without restrictions. This growth has made many online features today that would not have been possible just a few years ago. For example, progressive web applications (PWA) are a growing web design trend. They are popping up around the Internet to engage people to subscribe to content.
PWAs are installable experiences, like an app, that function entirely on the web. For example, YouTube uses PWAs and might send a notification in the corner of your screen when a creator you like posts a new video. These web apps are available in every browser and work very quickly on most devices. If you do not have a modern and responsive website, you will not be able to keep up with growing technologies, such as this one. Your business could utilize PWAs as a way to get out information about your business and make your site a better experience for customers. Without a website redesign, it is another opportunity missed.
Below is an in-depth video on responsive web design and progressive web applications, as well as how the two go hand-in-hand to create a better overall user experience. You should keep this in mind when deciding if a website redesign is the best choice for you.
You don’t want to miss out on capabilities to integrate your site with social media, marketing automation, texting, email marketing, and customer relationship management systems.
Marketing automation systems are a powerful web design trend that both small and large businesses can implement. These systems let you keep in touch with and track your website visitors from the first engagement through the entire sales funnel.
Third-party marketing automation tools like HubSpot, when integrated with your website, offer business owners the ability to see who repeatedly visits their site. The tool can also help you target that audience and draw them in again to become a repeat customer. As a result, your redesigned website can leverage marketing automation tools to help you send the right message, to the right audience at the right time.
Does your company have customer relationship management technology (CRM)? A customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. If so, you might benefit from website integration. It does not matter if you’re using Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics, website integration can help your employees close more deals.
If your website sends customer inquiries by email, you already know that this method is unreliable and hard to track. Integration means customer information is transferred directly to your CRM. With automation, there are fewer mistakes, and your sales team will get the information quickly and can act immediately on the opportunity. Therefore integrating your CRM with your website should be a top priority.
If you take advantage of email marketing to get your message out, you should take every opportunity to grow your marketing lists. Having tools that ask visitors on your website for permission to communicate with them is no longer an option for businesses, it is a must-have marketing tool! Email marketing platforms are critical for keeping your company email off of blacklists and make sure you are complying with privacy laws.
Combining the right message with your customers preferred medium will help with retention, conversion, and engagement. Jack hates to get an email but likes to get a text message from his favorite restaurant. Jane saves every email offer she gets and reviews them during lunch when planning a night out. You get the point. Texting is perfect for some customers but not for everyone.
Fortunately, major SMS service providers like Twilio and Nexmo have Application Programming Interface (API) capabilities that let you add SMS capabilities to your website. As a result, you can give customers the option to add their cell phone to your marketing list, and you can even send them text messages through your website. Therefore integrating your website with texting services is affordable and can produce the ultimate experience for customers. You can get instant responses and create the ideal experience for your customers.
Finally, if you made your website in the late 2000s or early 2010s, it is very likely you failed to include integration with social media sites. Facebook and Twitter were beginning. Social media is now an integral part of the internet user’s experience. Integrating your website with your social media channels will make it possible for customers and prospects to interact with you in an entirely new way. Therefore, a redevelopment of the site can lead to an increased ability to connect with social media sites that will grow your business’s identity.
The United States privacy act provides essential protection requiring businesses to gain permission and opt-out opportunities for digital marketing. HIPPA regulations protect sensitive information about a patient’s health records, and COPPA regulates and protects children from online abuse. Chances are your website, and business is already complying with these laws. The critical thing to note is that legislation is changing. You will want to try to protect your business from the legal risks and costs from compliance with future consumer protection laws. This planning can impact both your website and your approach to digital marketing.
While US privacy laws are not difficult to comply with, that is not the case in other countries. The European Union led the way in 2018 by regulating and protecting consumer privacy with the GDPR. Companies in the United States that do business with customers in the European Union have already complied with GDPR by tightening the way they handle customer data and privacy.
Today decision-makers and regulators are in the process of strengthening privacy laws.
Many feel the EU’s GDPR is a useful model for privacy regulations in the United States. One way you can be proactive is to comply with the privacy laws in the European Union. Most of the tools are already in place, and it should not cost a lot of money to make it happen.
As the Internet expands, our society needs to consider making it available to more and more people. Including those with disabilities. For many people who are deaf, blind, or have other limitations, finding accessible websites that cater to their needs can be very difficult. Furthermore, there is a growing aging population of seniors who are visually and hearing impaired. Making sure everyone who visits your website has the best possible experience should be a priority. Therefore, if you are a business with the funds and resources to redesign your website in an accessible manner, we see it as a worthwhile investment.
Every business can benefit from reaching people who are disabled. Investing in an accessible website is an excellent opportunity to grow your company. Many website accessibility features are beneficial to Search Engine Optimization and easy to accomplish.
If you see accessibility as a critical component of your site, consider making it a part of your biannual website redesign. At a minimum, you will want to use Google’s Light House Accessibility Audit Tool for testing. It is free, and you can use it to educate your web marketing team.
If you run a college or university or government agency, you may be required by law to maintain a website that is fully compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Automated tools are great, but they can miss major accessibility issues with websites. To accomplish full compliance, you will want an accessibility testing company that can do proper manual testing. However, for some small companies, full compliance is still a venture that is out of range, monetarily.
If your competitor’s website is accepting credit cards online, and you are not, it may be time to consider upgrading. Many use credit cards to pay for everything online, including clothes, movie tickets, and even food shopping. There is also a growing group of people that are using cryptocurrency. Ecommerce is an affordable option today; you don’t need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to sell products and services from your website.
Amazon and eBay are two of the biggest online marketplaces in the world. They have opened their platforms so small businesses can sell their products.
EBay.com and Amazon have had active Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for developers for many years. These APIs have allowed developers the ability to create online integration capabilities for both open source and custom eCommerce platforms.
Thanks to eBay and Amazon’s (APIs) web developers can connect to their platforms and synchronize orders and product offerings and inventory. As a result, millions of small companies can affordably integrate their website to reach millions of eBay and Amazon customers.
Therefore, you can have a shopping cart on your website that integrates your inventory and products with Amazon.com and Ebay.com. When a product sells on your website, it can be removed automatically from Amazon and eBay.
Amazon will even handle fulfillment for your business if you’re going to take a hands-off approach. There is a reason more than 300,000 US-based small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) sell through Amazon’s Marketplace service in 2017.
A website redesign can be an opportunity to reinvent the way you want your website to display in search engines. It is also a great time to plan the keywords in which you would like it optimized. If it has been years since you have done SEO, chances are, your company’s site does not rank well.
Google and other search engines change their algorithms for ranking over time. Therefore an optimized site five years ago is probably not optimized anymore. You will want to redesign your website so that you can leverage the latest SEO trends. This way, you can optimize your site for keywords that are going to bring in the most traffic.
More than people going to your site, you want people to stay on your site and utilize your services. Therefore, a website redesign can be crucial to optimization, as well as for creating a successful customer journey.
Finally, we see a website redesign as the best option for many businesses, big and small. Translation and localization are imperative for increasing your company’s business to new countries. If you have an old website, it will be more challenging to carry out those processes in an efficient manner. Therefore, if you are planning a multilingual website, having a website redesign that appeals to all potential audiences is necessary.
We hope our 12 website trends help you in planning your next website redesign. With a website redesign, your site can bring in more traffic than your competitors and help you reach potential customers. Not only that, but your website will be clean, user-friendly, and easy for everyone to use!
Our web designers are here to work with you and make sure your website fits the needs of your business. Furthermore, we will make it affordable, modern, easy to use, and update as you wish. We can work with most open source content management systems; this means you can manage your website in-house.
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Google My Business is a rapidly growing service that is essential for local SEO. However, because it is still a rising platform, some mistakes are easy to make, but also easy to avoid. We’re here to go over those mistakes and guide you through solutions to help make your Google My Business as helpful and useful as possible.
We want to make sure your business is living up to its full internet potential, which is why we are here to offer tips and solutions regarding some of the most common Google My Business mistakes you could be making.

Failure to claim your company’s profile is essentially the biggest mistake you could make in the realm of Google My Business. If you do not claim your profile, then you have no control over the information that is displayed regarding your business. By not claiming your company’s profile, the public can recommend hours and phone numbers, as well as other details, meaning that if that information is incorrect, your business could suffer. Wouldn’t it be bad if your company was closed on Saturday and Sunday, but nobody mentioned that in the recommended hours? Then, if people showed up on a day when you are not open, it would reflect poorly on your business and could result in loss of clientele.
It also means Google could make an accidental mistake regarding your business. If Google cannot quickly tell what kind of business you are, they may misidentify you, meaning that you would not appear in the correct search queries, resulting in no gains for your business.
We have an article already about how to complete your Google My Business profile to increase rankings, and it will provide an outline of all the information you should fill out to ensure that your Google My Business profile is a meaningful addition to your company’s online presence.

Claiming your Google My Business profile is a good step towards increasing your business’s overall credibility and reach, but you should also make sure you are completing and optimizing the profile. We have a blog post on the components most crucial to the growth of your business through Google My Business, but really, you want to be as thorough as possible in getting every portion filled out. There are a couple of sections you should be especially aware to fill out completely and correctly. Here are our best tips for avoiding mistakes regarding optimization of your profile. After all, complete profiles are 2.7x more likely to be seen as reputable.
One aspect of your profile you really want to complete wholly and succinctly is the “Categories” section of your profile. These categories are how people will be able to identify what kinds of services you offer. There is a complete list of categories available, so you can search out each of the groupings that will be most relevant to your business. You want to include all the categories that accurately reflect your brand while leaving off those that are simply a characteristic of your ideal market. For example, a hotel with a pool should be listed as “Hotel” or “Motel,” and not as “Swimming Pool.” You risk being seen as unreliable if you choose to categorize yourself too extensively.
Another mistake you don’t want to make is regarding the “Photos” section of your profile. Today, you can add a Logo, Cover Photo, and other photos, including action shots “At Work.” You will want to take advantage of these categories and insert images that look nice and represent your company well. You will want to prioritize shots that look best, so that way, those images are the first impression potential customers receive.
Remember, anyone can upload photos of your business to your Google My Business Profile. Don’t make the mistake of letting someone else upload the only photos that represent your business, as it will not help your business grow.
If you’re using Google My Business, it is clear that you want to see your business grow. Therefore, you should do all that you can to maximize the results of possible queries that could show your business as a search result.
Like your website, you don’t want to create a Google My Business profile and then never update it. Having an updated and active Google My Business profile tells potential customers that you care about your business’s image and its customers. There are several ways in which you can keep your Google My Business profile updated to inform potential customers best.
You will want to be diligent about updating your Google My Business profile with new Posts. These Posts deliver valuable information about your company, from offers and promotions to information about the services your company provides. If you never update your Posts, people will not know that your business is up-to-date and looking to grow.
Posts are an efficient and effective way to express your brand and what it offers. You should enhance your Google My Business profile using them. As Google My Business grows, it will become an increasingly big mistake not to use Posts in your profile.
If you create your Google My Business profile, but then never update the information regarding your hours, website, or other information as it is needed, your business will appear much less reliable to potential clients. You should be updating your business’s information frequently- it is just as important as updating your website.
You should always update links as needed and have your hours updated, especially around holidays. Outdated information makes your company look unprofessional and outdated. If people cannot rely on your details to be correct, they likely will not trust you to handle their services.
Therefore, you should always make sure you are updating your Google My Business profile in the same way you update your website. Both should accurately represent your business.
Another way that you can show potential customers that you are invested in your online presence is by engaging with those who engage with your profile. This means that you should be responding to those who use Google Reviews to comment about the quality of your business. Regardless of whether the review is good or bad, you should take the time to get back to people, as it will show that you care about your clients and the quality of your business.

There is also a Q&A section of Google My Business, in which members of the public can ask questions about the services you offer. You should be checking your Google My Business profile frequently to answer those questions. If you do not answer, then members of the public can, and they may not respond with accurate information, which can reflect poorly upon your business.
Remember, the best thing to do is to promote your business fairly and smartly, which includes keeping all aspects of your Google My Business profile up-to-date. You should ask customers to leave a review of your services on your profile, as you want legitimate reviews to boost your credibility.
The last thing you want to do is to misrepresent your company on your Google My Business profile, or anywhere else for that matter. While it is usually not intentional, any incorrect or improper information can lead to account suspension.
One good example of a misstep is the inclusion of keywords in the title of your Google My Business listing. For example, if you made the title of your Italian restaurant “Business name – Fine Italian Dining,” you may rank higher for the query “fine Italian dining,” but Google specifies that it is against its Guidelines to include unnecessary information in the title for the business. While this may seem like a natural step to enhance SEO, you should be careful, as you may end up with your business suspended if Google sees your business’s profile and acts to make sure that people are not taking advantage of their service. You should always take steps to make sure you are following Google’s Guidelines as closely as possible.
Additionally, you should take care to make sure there is not a duplicate business profile. For years, Google has had issues with businesses falsifying their addresses when they are not legitimate companies, which means they are essentially stealing customers from those who have otherwise earned them. Since Google is working to crack down on this issue, you will want to make sure you do not have multiple profiles that could put you in jeopardy. You want to make sure your business appears legitimate and trustworthy to potential customers, and if you are not truthful about your services, location, quantity, or type of business, it will reflect poorly.
Google My Business is one of the best tools for local SEO at this point, but it will only serve your business well if you are correcting your mistakes and optimizing your profile as efficiently as possible. All of the mistakes we mentioned above are simple to fix and will help your company’s profile rank higher, and your company perform better online.
If you need help with removing mistakes on your company’s Google My Business profile, we are here to help. NH Web Design has the expertise to make sure your business has a profile that will show off all the things you have to offer, which means developing the best page possible. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us for more information about how we can help you build your Google My Business profile in a manner that eliminates mistakes and helps your business thrive.
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]]>Small businesses are a booming concern, with more than thirty million small businesses in the United States alone.
That makes up over 99% of all businesses in the US.
That’s a pretty amazing statistic, but just the fact that there are tons of small businesses out there doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is guaranteed success with their own venture. In fact, only about half of all small businesses survive into their fifth year.
A great deal of what dictates success for a small business revolves around well-designed marketing, focusing on customer relations and gaining new customers. Here are three small business marketing strategies specifically designed to help businesses continue to grow, client after client.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but the visuals that you choose for your brand have a significant impact on the success of your marketing. Statistics indicate that 90% of the information that our brain actually process is visual. And we’re much more likely to retain visual information than we are oral or written content.

Image: pexels.com
Choose visuals that reflect your brand in every aspect of your content. You may start with logo designs that work as effective ambassadors to your brand.
The standards that you set for your visuals should follow a style guide that accurately communicates your brand identity. Everything from the color palette to the font choices, to the layouts and graphic styles, should fit harmoniously within the footprint of your brand.
Strong visuals that reflect your brand accurately gather more interest, are remembered more readily, and communicate effectively with potential clients.
Search engine optimization is an important concern for making sure your website is found by Google and other browsers. Experts suggest that blogging is the key to effective SEO.
This makes sense for a number of reasons. For one thing, your actual website content is much more likely to be static. It will be updated occasionally, rather than every day. Blogs, on the other hand, give you a lot more opportunities include SEO keywords.
As a matter of fact, websites that have blogs linked to them actually tend to have up to 434% more indexed pages, which gives Google tons of content to crawl through, index, and link to as a useful resource.
The nature of blogging also lends itself to SEO keywords more naturally. Because keywords, especially longtail keywords, can be detailed or in the form of a question, it can be difficult to fit them organically into website content.
If you don’t have the time to regularly update content yourself, look into hiring a blogger to do it for you. The more useful content you post to your company website, the more interest you generate, and the better the return on your marketing strategy.
Usable content, updated regularly, demonstrates to potential clients that your company is worth investigating.
Social media is becoming an expected way for brands to communicate with their customers. In fact, more than one in every three internet users state that they turn to social media in order to find out more about a brand.
So creating and maintaining social media profiles for your small business will already open you up to communication with potential new clients.

Image: pexels.com
But social media marketing is more effective when used as a combination marketing effort. Rather than just posting content on one platform, modify and adapt your content and post across all available platforms. Link back to your site or to your blog. Mine your blog for quotable content to use as visuals for posting.
And remember that social media is created to facilitate sociability. Start and continue conversations with clients and potential clients. Reach out for connections.
Cross-platform cooperative marketing reaches more possible clients and allows your small business make a personal connection.
It’s a fact that there’s a significant element of risk in opening a small business. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do to lessen the danger.
With smart marketing designed for small businesses, you can reach a bigger audience and convert consumers into clients.
Brianna Jensen is a content specialist who curates, writes and promotes content for online businesses. Connect with her to discover a world of content types, fit for your organizational needs.
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