Is Anyone Home?

Let’s be blunt for a minute here: if you aren’t optimizing your site for search engines like Bing or Google (do we still use Yahoo?), you’re making it harder on yourself from the start. As anyone in the design industry knows, coming up with something disruptive that catches the eye of everyone around you—well that’s the battle. You can design some top-notch sites, but if no one's finding them, you have no audience to show it off to.

Let’s be blunt for a minute here: if you aren’t optimizing your site for search engines like Bing or Google (do we still use Yahoo?), you’re making it harder on yourself from the start. As anyone in the design industry knows, coming up with something disruptive that catches the eye of everyone around you—well that’s the battle. You can design some top-notch sites, but if no one's finding them, you have no audience to show it off to.

On the same note, most people take between 1-3 seconds to make a first impression. If you’re site is highly optimized for search engines but it scares any would-be customers away, you aren’t doing your job by showcasing your credibility through content or design. You’ve been found. But can you keep them there?

Original Content

An effective website should be aesthetically pleasing, functional, and user-friendly--but also much more than that. A beautiful site is captivating, but captivating alone won't win-over your audience. You need to provide your viewers with the kind of content they can’t get elsewhere. Create custom case studies, blog posts, white papers—anything that YOU would get excited about if you were stumbling upon your page for the first time. If they can’t get it anywhere else, they’ll have more reason to check your site often.

Quick Loading

The slower your site is, the faster they’ll leave. Don’t get mad, you do it too. With a faster option always around the corner, you need to put some due diligence into your site’s framework. Most browsers have a setting to help you test your speeds in a simple matter. Google’s take: The average speed of it’s top hitting websites hovers around 10 seconds. That’s the average, so your site should make every stride to hit under that… anything over needs to be amended. Would you wait that long?

Here's a great tool to help you get started on increasing your pages speeds: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Incentives

Everyone loves “free.” Give your viewers a reason to keep coming back for more company "schwag."  Whether that means an eBook for filling out a contact form, or a free download of something you offer for completing a survey. The benefit is two-fold: you’re building trust and thought leadership in your brand while receiving (hopefully) valuable feedback about your customer profiles and audience’s desires.

SEO Planning

Optimizing your site and upkeeping it is critical, which is why you should invest in an SEO Maintenance Plan to enhance your website for future purposes. Consistent creation of fresh, keyword-rich (moderation, moderation, moderation) content is essential part of your effective plan which should include:

Landing Pages:

Specially designed pages attached to links, advertisements, and marketing initiatives. Landing pages help drive your visitors exactly where you want them to go to learn more about your services or take action.

Call-to-Actions:

Eye-catching attention grabbers that pull visitors to a predetermined target such as a contact form, survey, product purchase, or landing page.

Social Media:

Social Media (including blogging) can help you maintain a social presence online, which is becoming more and more vital as the world becomes more connected. Blogging is also a great way to consistently generate new content that promotes you as a worthwhile source.

By creating a holistic plan around your entire online presence (Social Media, Email, Landing Pages, website content, etc.) you're building a connected company that bends—not breaks. And if you need any help transforming your site from so-so to superstar, drop us a comment or contact us with your problem. We'd be glad to point you in the right direction.