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Social Media for Ecommerce – Getting Started

Posted on by Zafer

A wise person once told me if you want to reach people you need to go to the places they are.

This is a key principle in digital marketing for all websites and works well for ecommerce. So if your business is ecommerce you need to be where your customers and potential customers are rather than just waiting for them to come to you.

This is one of the reasons social media has developed into such an important tool for digital marketing.

Where else can you so easily find connected groups of people keen to like, share and talk about their interests and opinions?

Yet despite what appears to be a perfect situation I have found many ecommerce sites and brands struggle to get to grips with the art of using social media effectively.

So I created this series of articles to help outline some of the basics you need start to master social media marketing.

To start with let’s look at the foundations to successful social media marketing for ecommerce.

Know What You Want

Too often businesses jump into using social media without thinking want they really want to achieve.

Before you start think about your business objectives and goals these could include:

Increase salesIncrease sales from new customers

Increase salesImprove customer loyalty and repeat sales

Increase salesIncrease brand awareness

Increase salesGrow email subscribers

Increase salesPromote new product

Increase salesGenerate positive reviews

Be clear and specific about what you want to get out of your social media.

Know your Audience

Know Your Audience

It’s a topic I bang on about a lot, but you need to know who your audience is and for this it’s worth investing time to create detailed customer personas.

You can create personas using data from your analytics, talking to your team, talking to your customers and doing research including customer surveys.

Once you know more about your audience you can start to understand the sort of messages and content that will appeal and work in harmony with your objectives and goals.

Pay close attention to what’s important to your customers and any objections they could have. Also consider their hobbies and interests as all this data will feed directly into the content you create for and share on social media.

Select the Right Networks

Select the Right Networks

It’s at this point you should start to select which social networks you want to use. Using a network just because you think you should or your competitors use it isn’t enough.

Do consider the following:

  • Used by target audience
  • Used by industry influencers
  • Can manage with resources available
  • Ease of use and available features
  • Good performance data available

You need networks that work well and can be used efficiently and effectively.

Warning: Don’t ever treat social networks as a one post fits all. You need to tailor your posts to your networks with content, links and images, what works for Twitter will need to be adjusted for Facebook. Take this into account when considering resource available.

These three points will give you a solid foundation to your social media marketing. In the next article we will look at Social Media for Ecommerce – Content Planning

Social Media for Ecommerce – Content Planning

Posted on by Zafer

In my previous article we looked at creating a solid foundation for your ecommerce social media marketing by:

  • Setting clear objectives
  • Understanding your audience
  • Selecting the right networks.

In this article I’m going to focus on the content that is going to power your social media.

In marketing we regularly hear the phrase “Content is King”, but is this true?

While content is very important not all content is created equal, good content is about quality not quantity.

Quality Content

Quality Content

What makes up quality content varies from one ecommerce site to the next, for example the content used to promote a beauty website should be very different from the content for a DIY online store.

What makes content good quality is:

  • Relevance to your products, customers and potential customers
  • Easy to read and share
  • Appealing to look at
  • Works across multiple devices
  • Helps the reader and the brand
  • Is unique and not duplicated

Quality content isn’t always a long article it can take many forms from quick tips to video.

Planning Social Content

For successful social media campaigns you need to plan your quality content in advance.

Start by creating a week by week breakdown by social channel with spacing for how frequently you plan to post each day (don’t forget weekends). I like to plan a month in advance and will use the data from orvious month’s to adjust posting times and frequency.

Then draft out:

Content TypeContent Typearticle, quick tip, quote, video, image etc…

Post wordingPost wordingthis can be rough to start with

Hashtags & TagsHashtags & Tagslook for popular related tags or start creating your own

You can start with rough ideas and flesh out your content as you refine your plan. By sure to use lots of different types of content to test what works best with your audience.

As I said in my previous article don’t use the same post on every network. You should tailor what you say to the social channel even while promoting the same content.

Be sure to add notes to your plan about key events related to your products or audience. Also include content related to your campaigns and promotions.

You can also look for content trends that your audience like to follow like #motivationalmonday.

Within your plan make sure to leave space to check for and react to trending topics that effect your business and audience.

Some of the best content on social media is planned, but still feels of the moment!

Aim to spend a good amount of time on your content planning it will save you time later on.

Ready in Advance

Now you have a clear plan of all the content you need, ideally a month in advance you need to get it created.

This way you will always have content approved and ready to go when you need it. Not having content preped in advance leads to poor quality as you rush to find something to post. I have seen a number of businesses social media grind to a holt due to lack of content.

Look at your plan and see how you can group similar content together for quicker creation, for example if you plan a series of quotes its best to get these created in one go.

Once the content is created get it checked for any errors or mistakes these can put off potential customers.

Once your completely happy store the content and mark in your content plan to show which content you can ready for posting.

If your using a blog (which we recommend) you can often schedule the content on your blog so it will automatically go live when you want it.

Images & Video

Images and Video

Social Media loves images and video so try to include them in your content as much as possible. It can be tempting to use stock images, but actually real unique pictures and video work so much better and have a greater appeal.

Focus on creating your own quality images and including them in relevant posts where ever possible to maximise your reach and engagement.

You can also ask your audience to share images and videos of them using your products (if appropriate), this will open up the range of images and video content you have to work with. Why not reward the best ones with a free gift or discount.

Be sure to take advantage of image based social networks like Pinterest and Instagram. These channels are great for brand and product awareness and we have seen them generate significant sales for a number of brands.

 

89% increase in sessions for FDS Consult

Posted on by Zafer

The Problem

Fire Design Solutions, a leading fire engineering agency in UK, approached ExtraDigital to redesign and market their website www.fdsconult.com.

The FDS Group is a major player in the Fire Engineering space and at the time of reading have reach 1,000 projects completed since 2003. They needed a consultancy website which demonstrated their expertise and showed their excellent work which included the Olympic Athletes Village in 2015 and the Alexander McQueen store in London.

The site had an increasingly high bounce rate and search engine performance was poor. Visually, the site did not appeal to their target audience and wasn’t making use of their brilliant project visuals they had collected since the company started in 2003.

website design for FDS

The Solution

We used the follow in our web design and digital marketing solutions for FDS:

  • User and persona research –
    built a deeper understanding of the target audiences and their needs
  • Creating a selection of well thought out modern designs based on usability and best practice –
    web designs took into account how the users view and engage with the website
  • Migrated the site from Joomla to WordPress
  • Ensuring all CTAs were clearly visible to increase the volume of webinar sign ups
  • Designed an intuitive case studies section to clearly showcase projects
  • Optimising all content on the site in accordance with SEO best practice
  • Successfully putting the site live and completing all 301 redirects so as to not lose any previous SEO value

responsive web design for FDS

The Result?

In terms of the marketing, the sites are performing well above the base line. The site operates in a very competitive niche, which makes us extra proud of the hard work and dedication the team have shown to produce these excellent results.

Here are the statistics a year on (November 2014 vs November 2015)

  • 89% increase in Sessions – site traffic nearly doubled year on year
  • 15% drop in the bounce rate
  • 37% increase in page views
  • 43% increase in SEO traffic

Social Media for Ecommerce – Being Social

Posted on by Zafer

In our last few articles we have looked at creating a foundation for your ecommerce social media marketing and creating a content plan. In this article we will look at getting to grips with being active on social.

If you think social media success is just about posting up lots of great content then you have really missed the point. Social Networks have grown to be so big online by bring people together to interact with each other.

If you don’t interact on your social channels with your audience and potential customers you are missing a huge part of what makes social media successful.

Audience Engagement

In the physical world if a customer says to a sales assistant they like a product or asks a question you would expect the sales assistant to acknowledge the customer and respond.

Well it’s no different for social media, when people interact with your content through likes, shares and comments it’s your opportunity to be the sales assistant and give a response.

You should always answer a comment even the negative ones, staying positive and be helpful is the key here.

You can thank people for sharing content, but if you have a lot of shares you might not want to do this on an individual level. It’s the same with likes you might not want to thank each person, but you could post how blown away you are by how many likes you got.

Make your audience feel valued and appreciated by not only engaging with them, but also actively asking for their opinions and feedback through questions.

Fan Hunting

As I said in my first article Social Media for Ecommerce – Creating a Solid Foundation you need to actively go out and find your audience on social media.

Try searching on key hashtags to your brand or products and you will find a whole host of content being shared that is relevant to you.

These fans may not be interacting with your channel of page, but are promoting you independently.

Liking, sharing and interacting with these posts can help you:

  • Grow your audience
  • Connect and build relationships with people already advocating for your brand
  • Increase sales

You can also use this method to find key topics being discussed that you might want to contribute on. In this case rather than fans your looking for potential fans/customers, for example someone might tweet about a beauty problem they have and as a relevant beauty brand you can comment with tips and ideas to help.

Following and Sharing Content

On social media it pays to follow the right people this not only gives other a feeling for what you are about, it can also help you connect with industry influencers and find content gems.

So who should you follow?

It’s up to you but a good rule is to follow:

  • Industry news and key publications related to your brand and products
  • Influencers on your subject – that could be a top beauty blogger with a huge following
  • Organisations, charity and bodies that post related quality content
  • Partner businesses – these could include suppliers, sister companies and business you collaborate with

I don’t recommend following competitors, do by all means keep an eye on the competition, but you don’t need to follow them to do this.

While most content on your channel should be your own its good practice to regularly share great content from others. It’s another reason to follow good content on social media.

When sharing keep it relevant to your audience and objectives, check and read what you are sharing carefully and be sure not to share competitor content.

Sometimes you might be asked to share content, which is fine, but always check it carefully to make sure you’re not being caught out with a hoax.

 

So by now you’re well on your way to making social media work for your brand with a good foundation, content plan and active social profile.

 

In my next series of articles I will take things a step further and look at social advertising, running competitions, retargeting and much much more…

 

B2B Marketing 5 Tips for Success

Posted on by Zafer

The internet is a great place to market B2B services and solutions, how do I know?

Well for over 12 years I have worked successfully with many B2B businesses marketing their services online. Since joining Web Designer Vip over 7 years ago I have had the pleasure of working with several regular B2B clients who are still seeing great results year on year.

The following are five of my top tips to create successful B2B marketing campaigns.

Set Clear Objectives and Goals

I can’t tell you how many times I run a training session or start a campaign where the first thing I say is “what are our objectives”.

You need clear objective in place with your marketing as these will not only guide all your endeavours, but also give you something to measure you success by.

When planning your marketing objectives and goals think are they:

  • Doable.
  • Understandable.
  • Manageable.
  • Beneficial.

Also make sure everyone knows the objectives and goals for your marketing both in-house and in your external agency.

Know Your Audience

This is more than just a vague idea of who your target businesses are for your marketing. Really successful campaigns have a much more detailed knowledge of the audience that is used to tailor content and messages.

This is often called personas, but really it’s about understanding what makes your audience and tick.

So consider things like:

  • Who makes the purchase decisions
  • What are their problems
  • How can you solve these problems
  • What objections might you need to over come

Select the Right Mix

Getting your marketing mix right is key, as to reach your audience you need to use multiple channels both on and off line.

Most online channels have some interaction with each other and a converted lead seldom comes from just one source like SEO or email marketing.

An example:

Mr Right sees your PPC ad and visits the website, he likes what he sees, but wants to check the market place to see if this is the best solution. After looking online he visits the website again, but this time via organic search results. He needs to get approval so he bookmarks the site. Once he has approval Mr Right comes back and completes the contact form via his bookmark link.

In your analytics you see the lead coming from direct traffic, but in reality both PPC and SEO had a part to play in this lead generation.

If you dig a little deeper in analytics data you can see conversion attribution data and work out which channels are supporting as well as closing leads. This data can help you see where to start to invest in your marketing.

Find more information on Google Analytics Attribution.

Try New Ideas

Sticking to the tried and tested is a common b2b marketing mistake and actually limits your reach.

Don’t be afraid to try something new, but do test it properly with again clear objectives and goals. Also be sensible is posting on Instagram really going to appeal or reach your target audience.

Areas like social media, retargeting, creative content and even ecommerce can work well for B2B marketing, when they are carefully planned and executed.

Here is one of the advantages in using a good outsourced marketing agency like Web Designer Vip as they will be actively training and testing new marketing channels, tools and methods.

Set Targets

Having clear targets helps focus your marketing be that in-house or with an external agency.

Targets must be specific and realistic and so a good place to start is by reviewing your previous results year on year as well as industry data.

Be sensitive to the marketing channel and the resources you have available.

SEO can take time to build strong positioning, while PPC is much more instant, but will depend on competition and advertising budgets. Social may take time to build a following as can email marketing.

Also be prepared to adjust targets if circumstances change for example you may plan to add 2 new case studies per month, but your content writer leaves part way through the year and has not been replaced.

 

What are you doing to prepare for voice search?

Posted on by Zafer

Whether you use voice search or not, marketers need to sit up and listen to recent noise and make a judgement – but we urge you to think long term.

We all know the love affair that is teenagers and their mobiles – who has time to type these days? It’s predicted that over 55% of teenage smart phone users use voice search in some form showing signs that it may become ubiquitous in the next few years. Remember, for longevity of your brand, markets should also be thinking about the next generation of users and how they interact with technology to get your message to right people at the right time using the right medium.

So how will voice search affect your content?

Every one of your users’ needs a question answered and are looking for a product or service to solve their problems. In the information age the aim of the game is to education and demonstrate your subject leadership to build trust that you or your product can do exactly what it says on the tin. If you’ve been producing great quality content that users find valuable and ‘answers your consumers questions and concerns’ – congratulations – your 90% there.

If not – where have you been!

Here are some quick content tips:

Consider the questions your consumers ask in your content marketing strategy (sidebar: If you don’t have one see this article on content strategy for guidance in how to get started). Voice search aside, providing this information is the key to demonstrating knowledge and thought leadership. Let’s consider a hypothetical real estate business. Your consumers will be in the market for a new house and asking:

  • Where is the best place to live in X
  • What are house prices like in X
  • Are there any local schools in X
  • (And of course) Is there a Nandos in X

It’s your job to communicate your content, message and brand by being present at this in the sales funnel us marketers call the awareness and consideration stage – remember, content attracts and engages! Be your client’s best mate and be there for them when they need you the most.

To summarise the effect on content:

  • Focus on relevance not keywords
  • Answer your users questions in your websites content
  • Consider your users personas

So how will voice search affect your SEO?

Semantic Search

Remember that Google uses semantic search.

Wikipedia: “Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.”

This means that Google no longer looks at a short keyword phrase but the relevance and context of the whole site. These advances have moved us from former queries like “restaurants in Rochester,’ to more specific queries such as ‘where to eat Indian food in Rochester’ or ‘what is the best place to eat Indian food in Rochester.’

With that said, again the focus is on creating relevant content that answers questions.

Mobile Optimisation

The majority of mobile searches will come from those using mobile devices equipped with Siri or Cortana. If you still haven’t made the jump to a responsive website yet, maybe this will give you the push. It’s been common knowledge for some time that Google ranks mobile optimised sites more highly in search engines. Be sure to optimise your content for mobile first to take advantage of this rise.

Local Search

Have you invested in your local strategy? Searches such as ‘best Chinese restaurants’ will serve local results as opposed to a list of Chinese restaurants and voice search will take advantage of this!

Local SEO has very much changed. Doing a search for ‘plumbers in Kent’ hardly returns individual websites and results. You will generally see Yelp, check a trade and other review sites dominating the top of search results. Ensure you are listed in Google my business, and build relationships with many local business to promote your local work to help you take advantage of local voice search.

So Should I have voice search on my website?

Our verdict: there is no short or medium term gain in developing native voice search within a website. The technology at present is nowhere near completion due to the following issues:

  • Browser support for voice  / microphone input is too patchy – the infrastructure and technology just isn’t that far along yet to get relialable results from voice searches for websites. Millions has gone into refining mainstream voice search platforms such as Siri. Browsers have a long way to go.
  • Accessibility issues when no microphone device attached – if your user doesn’t have a microphone, then voice search is as useful as a chocolate teapot.
  • Voice search would be used outside the website to access info in the website or land in the website – voice search results will show a snippet of content from a web page and may give users even less incentive to go onto the site.

 

Disadvantages of SEO

Posted on by Zafer

Can there be disadvantages to SEO?

Yes there can, as experts in digital marketing at ExtraDigital we know that all marketing channels have their benefits and disadvantages, this article will cover some of the ones we have most commonly observed.

Before we look at the disadvantages let first examine what SEO is.

What is SEO?

SEO or search engine optimisation is a digital marketing method that works to optimise a website to perform well in search engine results.

This includes ranking and appearing well for search terms and variations that are used by your target audience in natural or organic search listings.

The SEO method involves not only making adjustment to the website itself, but also work on the wider internet to build a sites authority and position.

Benefits of SEO

If you have spent any time looking at the SEO services available you will see lots of focus on the benefits.

While SEO has many benefits two areas we like to focus on at ExtraDigital are:

  • building relevant traffic to your website
  • supporting and generating leads and sales

Disadvantages of SEO

Getting noticed by more than your target Audience

1)  Getting noticed by more than your target audience

As you get more visible online through SEO so your competitors will start to notice and they may well up their game to compete.

Increased competition is fairly common once competitors see your marketing is working especially if their leads and sales are dropping.

Also expect to be targeted by a lot more people trying to sell you their services. From other SEO agencies, to advertising the greater your exposure online the more others will start to see you as a desirable prospect to work with.

Spam too can increase for the same reasons, but with good filters in place this can easily be managed.

Over Success

2) Over Success

As much as every business wants to be a success there is a real danger of too much and too fast. If you can’t handle the volume of leads and sales then opportunities will be lost and customers let down.

Once SEO gets into full swing I have seen cases where the up surge in leads has been more than the client could handle.

Unlike channels like PPC which can easily be switched on and off SEO isn’t so instant. Even if you stop your SEO it’s likely the work already in place will have some lasting effect. Although over time your SEO position will slip if not maintained often due again to the increased efforts of your competitors.

As you can see it’s very important to make sure you have the right structures in place to cope with increases in leads and sales.

Black and White Hat

3) Black Hats and White Hats

The SEO world can feel a little like the Wild West, while most agencies offer a good and fair service there are some that don’t.

Some companies (Black Hats) will happily break the rules to get you to the top in the short term only for you to find you get caught with a Google Penalty that gets you kicked out of search results due to their methods.

Then there are companies (White Hats) who work hard to stay within the rules and give you great SEO results through regular quality work.

There are also companies who sit between both camps almost grey hats so to speak.

Often it’s hard for businesses to know who to trust with their SEO and we sadly do see websites that have been damaged by bad SEO work.

Our advice is to look for the White Hat SEO’s, they won’t be the cheapest, but they will give you the best value for your investment.

Check the company’s reputation, have any of their clients had a Google penalty?

At ExtraDigital we are proud to be White Hat’s, working within Google guidelines with innovative as well as tried and tested SEO. While we have helped websites recover from Google Penalties we happily have never had one of our clients receive one.

Magento SEO – measuring success

Posted on by Zafer

What makes a successful SEO campaign? How do you measure it?

This is best answered by first considering that SEO is a type of marketing. So how are marketing campaigns measured?

For a marketing campaign, measurement of success would usually be in terms of the number of sales, the volume of sales, the number of new purchasers, and the number of abandoned baskets or enquiries. Different campaigns would place a different priority on each of these elements.

So surely the same should be true for SEO for an ecommerce store such as a Magento shop. Success should be measured by the number of sales, the volume of sales, the number of new purchasers, and the number of abandoned baskets or enquiries. It should not be measured in terms of keyword rankings or other parameters such as inbound links, but directly on the actual sales data.

Within print or magazine advertising, readership data is used to influence where ads are placed, but the effectiveness is measured on sales generated, not numbers of printed magazines.

Attributing SEO work to sales

In a simple world, consumers would arrive just once at a website and either make a purchase or not. But in reality consumers may visit a website many times before purchase. For ecommerce SEO the most important task is first contact – getting the consumer to your Magento shop when first seriously searching for one of your products. It may be the consumer bookmarks the page and returns later as a direct visitor. For this reason the first interaction attribution model is best for ecommerce SEO.

Many business owners use Analytics to measure SEO success. But not all are aware of the very large differences in conversion data by attribution model, particularly for ecommerce. Analytics by default uses the last interaction attribution model which is well suited to PPC work, but less good for SEO work.

Example of how attribution impacts SEO results for Magento store.

For one particular Magento shop, the number of sales from organic search more than doubled after a couple of months SEO work but the actual data varies considerably according to attribution model used, by as much as 29%.

So in summary when measuring the success of an SEO campaign for a shop use sales data (not rankings or links) – but ensure you understand the details of the attribution model used.

 

SMS as a Marketing Platform

Posted on by Zafer

When you walk around nowadays, nearly everyone has their smart phone on them and they use them in ways that we didn’t believe was even possible even just 10 years ago.

SMS as a Marketing Platform

Smart phones allow you to do everything from organise your life, keep taps on family members and friends, make purchases online, sell online, play on games and much more.

Communicating on a smart phone is even easier with the ability to send and receive messages via social media and email as well as traditional calls.

From a business prospective, in all this communication are the ever popular direct emails from companies to consumers getting lost amongst the many emails received from companies each day?

Is there a way to stand out from the crowd?

Is SMS Marketing an Alternative to Email Marketing?

As the use of mobiles as a marketing, promotional and point of sales tool heats up should you be considering alternative channel of communication instead of email marketing? One possibility is the use of SMS Marketing.

SMS Marketing has been around for a while now but has recently gained momentum as a great tool to help distinguish your marketing communication from the many others that an average consumer will receive each day.

The concept of SMS marketing is that you will send text messages to your potential clients reminding them of your sales, offers and deals. They can be used alongside other means of communication to act as a reminder or a prompt.

SMS as a Marketing Platform

The Benefits of SMS Marketing

One of the key benefits to SMS marketing over any other form of direct or online marketing is that this is the fastest way of putting your message into your consumer hands.

Simply Cast states that the average time between sending your message and it being read is just 7 seconds! – couldn’t get any better turnaround time for those lighting sales or promotions.

Simply Cast also states that SMS Messages have an incredibly high open rate and conversion rate with almost every SMS sent opened and read, unlike emails. This instantaneous receipt of the SMS matched with its almost guaranteed action of reading the SMS means that this method of communication is well worth its very cheap cost of sending.

Indeed, when compared to email marketing the cost of SMS marketing is minimal. On top of this SMS marketing does not have to jump through all the hoops that are spam filters that email marketing does. The only restriction on the use of contact details is that you must have received permission from the person’s whose number it is for communication.

These factors make SMS marketing cheap, quick, easy and with minimal fuss and energy needed to run.

Use for Post-Sales

SMS Use for Post-SalesSMS marketing can also be used as a great way to ensure good customer service for your customers.

Many companies use SMS to send messages once orders have been placed directly to the purchaser’s phone. These messages include confirmation of delivery times or notification of items ordered available as click and collect.

Examples of companies who use SMS post sale are Wickes, Argos and Next. All of whom have achieved great results.

Do or Don’t?

As shown SMS marketing has many benefits but when it comes to whether you should, or shouldn’t, carry out SMS marketing it becomes an individual company preference.

If you are an ecommerce shop then yes, SMS marketing can assist you greatly and provide you with many benefits. This grows with the more engagement you have with your customers and how likely they are to appreciate reminders and promotions from yourself.

If you are a hotel or restaurant in the hospitality sector then SMS marketing can be very useful for yourself as it can allow you to keep in contact with previous guests and inform them of deals and discounts coming up  –  if they are a frequent user of hotels or restaurants then their appreciation for these SMSs will be greater.

Other industries like schools and nurseries can also use SMS marketing as a way of getting information directly to parents and guardians. Reminders about open days and events running can easily be sent via SMS and reduces the use of paper/letters which get lost or thrown away.

Even industries such as Recruitment can use SMS marketing as a way of reminding people on their books of new job opportunities and deadlines. An instant reminder rather than an email they look at a day to two later.

The Benefits of SMS marketing

There really is no limit to SMS marketing other than the limit of the characters themselves. With an allowance of just 160 characters per text you need to ensure that you have the ability to get your point across with just a few characters.

What Tools are available to help me with SMS Marketing?

There are many tools out there that will allow you to send SMS marketing text messages, one of these tools is called FireText.

FireText promotes itself as the number 1 SMS Marketing platform for businesses – they provide a simple, flexible and flat rate pricing structure to allow you to use their SMS platform with no contract or commitment needed.

As with most services, the more SMSs you send the cheaper the price gets but you can expect to send each SMS for around 2.2p each.

Their SMS platform allows you to send, receive, track and analyse your text marketing campaigns with ease. Clients of FireText that currently use the service included Volkswagen, Pizza Hut and even The Cabinet Office.

Competitors to FireText include Text Local and Text Marketers.

Text Local offers a very similar service but is marginally more expensive. It’s users include John Lewis and P&O Ferries. Text Marketers’ service is also very similar but is the most expensive of the three platforms on offer. This service is used by Land Rover, BMW, Subways and Dominos Pizza.

Assistance Needed for SMS Marketing?

If you are looking for further information or assistance in running SMS marketing campaigns using any of the platforms mentioned in this blog post then simply contact ExtraDigital today.

Ensuring that your Customers can Contact You

Posted on by Zafer

Every good business knows that you need to be easily accessible for your customer. Part of this accessibility is the ease of contacting the business when needed.

Your contact details need to be up to date for this and correct.

Nowadays with websites, social media and online directories a lot of people are finding it harder to manage just a wide spread of contact details. Keeping them up to date is no longer a two second job looking at one location; it’s a multitude of login details and URLs to check.

Ensuring that your Customers can Contact You

The impact that poor contact information can have on your SEO is more than a lot of people think. Considering that all your social channels and online directories are linked on the world wide web, it becomes very clear to Google when you are out of sync. Out of sync signals lack of effort and care which in turn affects your rankings.

Not to mention the confused clients of yours who are reaching out to you cross channels.

If only there was something that could help!

MOZ Local!

MOZ Local allows you to do just that.

You can sign in and push latest contact information direct to all the major data aggregators and online directories.  This is great news as it means that it saves you time and it spreads your contact details throughout various sources very easily.

With MOZ Local you can get emails reminding you to update the listings, delete any listings and it even makes you aware of any duplications / errors in listings that you may have.

On top of all this it also highlights to you any potential channels that you aren’t utilising.  Might even be further avenues for growth to be found here for you.

Naturally MOZ Local offers full reporting of your listing status and allows you to view all rankings, reviews, traffic data and the performance of your listings over time. Great for assisting with your marketing objectives.

The Practicalities

The MOZ Local service itself isn’t cheap but when you look at the time you would spend updating these systems yourself then you may find that you save quite a bit. At the moment it is priced a $84 a year per location for businesses managing up to 99 locations a year.

You can get an Enterprise level for businesses managing more than 100 locations for $69 a year per location which makes it far better for those companies with multiple locations.

However if you want access to the reporting side of the system then you have to pay an additional $120 or $99 with the Enterprise level of business management.

Are There Alternatives?

Alternative sources to use other than MOZ Local do exsist. One example is Yext. www.yext.com

Yext does everything that MOZ Local does with prices available on request. However you can white label this service with your own company branding very easily.

Sources in the online marketing community have stated that there have been rumours of Yext removing all changes made whilst with them if you cancel their services. No concrete evidence of this has yet to emerge BUT MOZ Local state very clearly on their website that if you cancel your service with them then your listings remain and are not reverted to their previous state.

On the other side of the Yext / MOZ Local debate there are sources in the online marketing community who believe that Yext is faster at indexing your websites in the listings than MOZ Local at the moment.

What Should You Do?

Here at ExtraDigital we don’t think that one size fits all, your use of these services should depend on what benefits your company can gain from using them.

However, we do believe that you should make use of the free trials offered by these services as they do provide you with a useful overview of whether your company is actually ensuring that customers can contact you.

Below you can see both the MOZ Local (on the left) and Yext (on the right) results for the popular John Lewis department store.

MOZ Local Listing Results for John LewisYext Listing Results for John Lewis

Fire Design Solutions Case Study

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The Problem

Fire Design Solutions, a leading fire engineering agency in UK, approached ExtraDigital to redesign and market their website www.firedesignsolutions.com.

The site suffered from a high bounce rate and poor performance in search engines. The site was no longer reflecting the status of the company. Visually, the site did not appeal to their target audiences and personas and wasn’t making use of their brilliant project case studies they had of the excellent projects they have been involved with.

Fire Design Solutions

The Solution

ExtraDigital put a great web design together by taking the following steps

  • User and persona research to see what type of user would be using the website and what information they would like to see
  • Creating a selection of well thought out modern designs based on usability and best practice, taking into account how the users view and engage with the website
  • Ensuring all CTAs were clearly visible to increase the volume of webinar sign ups
  • Designed an intuitive case studies section to clearly showcase projects
  • Optimising all content on the site in accordance with SEO best practice
  • Successfully putting the site live and completing all 301 redirects so as to not lose any previous SEO value

The Result?

In terms of the marketing, the sites are performing well above the base line. The site operates in a very competitive niche which only enhances the results.

Here are the statistics a year on:

  • 56.19% increase in page/session
  • -14.11 drop in the bounce rate
  • 68% increase in page views

Ecommerce Marketing Services

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Ecommerce Marketing Services

ecommerce marketing

If you’re selling directly to customers online, either as a small online shop or a full online retail platform, your online marketing strategy can make or break your store. ExtraDigital have one aim in mind – to increase your ecommerce sales revenue whilst actively getting more for your marketing spend.

We believe that ecommerce marketing is all about having your product visible at the time that users are ready to make a purchase. We do this by making sense of the sales data and translating this into actionable items for strategic execution to increase your ecommerce sales.

MobileGeddon : How to make your website mobile friendly.

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Welcome to our Quiz on Mobile Websites

Earlier this year Google released their latest algorithm targeting websites that aren’t mobile friendly and punishing them in results. Google is a resource for the searcher and is aiming to provide the best internet and search results they can. A big part of this is page speed and the ever increasing mobile market.

Mobile usage topped desktop in 2014 as the primary device that people use to access the internet. Any savvy marketer should have been ready for Google’s shift in priority. If your site has been left out in the cold, here are 6 top tips to help you create a mobile-friendly website.

 

Off Site Blog, On Site Blog or Both?

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New Year we are all looking forward, wondering what this year will bring, making plans and promising to get completed those outstanding projects. For those with big ambitions for their website and business, you are probably looking at 2016 as the year to make that big push online. But how?

One great way to improve you online reach and authority is to start a blog.

Blogging

Blogging is a big area and really started as an online journal or diary, but has grown to be so much more.

For business a blog is a great outlet to write and share content aimed at your target audience and industry influencers. You can promote what you do and show off your knowledge often in a way your existing website structure doesn’t allow.

Why Blog?

Blogging has been very popular over the past couple of years and is still a growth area. Online blogs are seen as a highly trusted source of information and as such have real power to influence customer’s decisions.

Blogs can also be used to provide content for your social media and email campaigns. How often do you struggle to find something good to post on social!

Blogs do need to be posted on frequently and the content needs to be:

  • Useful
  • Unique
  • Quality

Ok so yes you want to start a blog, but:

Should I have an On Site Blog or an Off Site Blog?

Where to have your blog depends on what you want achieve.

Should I have an On Site Blog or an Off Site Blog?

 

Benefits of an On Site Blog

There are many benefits of having an onsite blog to your website, 3 of the main ones are:

Fresh Content

Appeasing Google’s Love of Fresh Content

It can often be far easier to give Google the fresh content that it craves through the form of an onsite blog post than trying to add new pages to other sections.

So if you are struggling to put new content regular on your site a blog can help.

Helps On Site SEO
Helps Onsite SEO

With an onsite blog you can target keyword topics in more depth and build onsite keyword authority all under the one domain.

If you are struggling to get ranking positions on keyword areas for your website an onsite blog can give you a place to add the content, you need.

Attract Links to your Domain

Providing you put link worthy content on your blog you can use an onsite blog to help generate more back links to your website.

The key here is to add content people want to link to and to promote it well online.

Benefits of an Off Site Blog

There are also many benefits to having an offsite blog, the top 3 here include…

Tap into Existing Networks Audience
Tap into Existing Networks Audience

Blog sites like WordPress already have huge audiences and having a blog on one of these networks can help you reach a bigger audience than hosting it on your site.

The best way to gauge this is to do some research to see just how big the existing audience for your sector is on these Networks. This can also be useful in highlight good topics and other related tips like tagging.

Create Distance

If the topics and content, you want to cover doesn’t completely fit with your website then hosting it offsite can be a better solution.

You can then preserve the voice and feel of your website without compromising on exploring interesting topics that your audience want to know more about.

This can be good if you want to create more fun focused content that could jar with your domains SEO focus.

Trust Factor

An external blog can have a greater trust factor especially if it has more of an independent look and feel.

You can also invite industry experts and other suitable contributors to create content for the blog to further demonstrate its authority, which in turn will help build its readership.

That being said you should never mislead visitors into thinking they are reading content from an independent source if it is being produced internally.

To go with this content should be less about selling and more about helping and informing.

Should I have an On Site Blog or an Off Site Blog?

So Should I have an Onsite Blog or an Offsite Blog

If you’re in a small niche and struggle to find somewhere on your site to post fresh content, then an onsite blog will probably work best.

If you’re in a more competitive market and looking to explore topics and connect with a wider audience, then an external blog is probably a better option.

In some cases, you might even want to use both methods, which is fine providing both can be resourced and don’t use duplicated content.

Either way, get blogging and realise the full value for yourself today.

Responsive Website for Inspire Community Trust

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With an ever increasing trend for website visitors to use mobiles and tablets the need for responsive websites, (a website that repsonds and adapts to be viewed on the smaller mobile and tablet screens), is becoming a must have.

This need is acute for organisations such as charities; their reach and audiences are increasingly more likely to search for them via mobiles devices, often as a result of the immediate nature of the services and support they provide.

This was very much the case for Inspire Community Trust.

Responsive Website for Disability Charity

The Client

Inspire Community Trust are a growing disability charity based in Bexley. They were founded in 2005 with the aim to improve and develop facilities for less able people and carers in need of support.

With a brilliant hub in the Slade Green area they are able to provide a wide range of services to people with visual impairments, disabilities and sensory impairments.

The Project

The aim of the project was to give the Inspire Community Trust website a complete makeover, so that it would fit in with their new branding and raise the standards of the website to make it truly accessible to all those using their services.

ExtraDigital did this by re-designing their website to give it a more modern look, with a sleek design focused on the ease of use and accessibility for all.

At the heart of all of this was the much needed action to make the website responsive so that the visitor experience for all was the same across all devices. This helped future proof their website, (use of mobile devices will certainly not waning anytime soon), and ensure that all of their visitors could use the website with ease.

Responsive Website for Disability Charity

The Outcome

The website was successfully designed, built and developed by our in-house team of project managers, designers and developers to meet and succeed our client’s expectations.

The website has far more functionality than it had before, which has helped the organisation to use it in a much more useful way. Some of this additional functionality includes…

  • Instant Feedback forms found on all pages to ensure up to date feedback on the services provided,
  • Contact forms for ease of communication by all their users,
  • Staff Only Areas to assist the employees of Inspire with their day to day activities,
  • Online shop to provide instant access for their users to vital equipment and tools,
  • An all round better responsive website that definitely has the ability assist with the aims of Inspire Community Trust.

Overall, this new responsive site has seen a fall in the bounce rate of organic traffic coming to the site of 40%. Whilst the amount of time that an average user spends on the site has shot up by 104% – showing just how much more useful and functional this new site is to its users.

How Can I Get These Same Results for My Website?

If you are a charity or an organisation that wants to see these types of improvements and more then contact our team today on 01227 68 68 98. We have a wealth of knowledge and experience that is sure to give you a better designed, better built and easier to market website.

Check out some of our other successes on our website today or our Portfolio to view more of our brilliant designs.

Should Your Online Shop Target China?

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Are you an ambitious UK online retailer?

Do you sell or are you considering selling online internationally?

If the answer to these questions is Yes, then you’re not alone. Almost half of all the big UK online retailers are selling overseas.

However, there is one marketplace even the large online stores seem to be missing and that’s China.

Despite recent news reports saying China is in economic slowdown its online shopping market is growing. In fact, Information Age reported this month that the Chinese total ecommerce market is predicted to grow by 50% to $6.5 trillion by 2020.

The article also highlighted that WorldPay had reported that 44% of people in China shop on overseas websites. Plus other media reports from the 4th quarter of 2015 also confirmed that Chinese shoppers currently make up a quarter of UK online exports.

China is certainly still a country of opportunity for oniine retail.

Online Shopping that Appeals to China

So if you’re an online retailer should you expand your horizons to China?

Well UK products that appear popular in China include:

  • British clothing, footwear and accessories
  • Cosmetics and other beauty products
  • UK groceries, food, drink and alcohol

If you’re online shop covers these markets, then you should strongly consider targeting China.

To reach this audience your going to need to cover some key requirements including:

  • A dedicated Chinese website
  • Authentic quality product range
  • High payment security
  • Offer full duties calculations

But its worth the investment, because if you foster the Chinese market it will repay you with loyal repeat customers.

Chinese Websites and Marketing

At Web Designer Vip we have been working on multilingual web design and marketing projects for many years including Chinese, Russian, French and Arabic markets.

We understand that often these markets have more than one written language.

While the official language of China is Mandarin it has two different written forms, known as simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. The simplified Chinese is used by people in mainland China and further south, In Malaysia and Singapore. While Traditional Chinese is also used by people in mainland China plus some of the islands such as Taiwan and Hong Kong.

We have created website for both including organising all the necessary translations.

For marketing in China you have to start with SEO, but don’t think Google, its Baidu that’s the top search engine here. But again Asian markets have a much wider range of search engines requiring a more skilled approach to maximise reach.

So if you want to expand your online business interests abroad then come and talk to us and we can help you avoid the pitfalls to reap the benefits of international sales.

 

83% increase in total traffic YOY for Logistics Consultant

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The Problem

Web Designer Vip had been carrying out the internet marketing for Gideon Hillman for many years which saw his company grow from a 2 person operation to a national business, working with companies such as Siemens, McDonalds, Volvo, Ronseal and the Co-operative.

The website was no longer reflecting the calibre of the clients that Gideon was getting. He wanted a site that reflected his leading position in Logistics Consulting as well as modernising the site the site to appeal to cater for mobile and tablet browsers.

Before:

The Solution

  • Analysis of business objectives to discover what the aims of the website are
  • We conducted research to re-establish the 4 core areas of the business are and how to direct users to the appropriate page on the website.
  • We created a selection of well thought out modern designs based on usability and best practice, taking into account how the users view and engage with the website
  • We designed and created an interactive banner to encourage a higher number of interactions on the page whilst intuitively improving the user journey
  • We ensured all CTAs and contact details were clearly visible to increase the volume of enquiries
  • Made the site responsive to any device the site is viewed with.
  • We re-optimised all content on the site in accordance with SEO best practice
  • Successfully putting the site live and maintained SEO value by maintaining URL structure

After

The Results

Since then the site, and the business, has continued to flourish. Here are the statistics from the website:

  • SEO Traffic: 83% increase in total traffic year on year
  • SEO Traffic: 54% increase year on year

Gideon was extremely grateful saying:

…the only problem we could have faced from the results we get…was being able to respond to and resource all the enquiries and subsequent projects, however we have as a result of the success of the website employed additional staff dedicated to managing and responding to the enquiries and also increased our consultant team

Online Ecommerce Store

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The Problem

Be Safe Direct specialise in selling a variety of fire safety products from full smoke ventilation systems to fire extinguishers. Web Designer Vip has been working with Be Safe Direct for some time and have been able to help the business grow into a successful ecommerce store.

Web Designer Vip currently manage PPC, SEO and email marketing and also redesigned the current Magento store to make it more modern and user friendly.

The original site looked very dated and attracted a high number of useless visitors. The aim was to re-design the site to make the user journey easier for customers to make a purchase and to change the SEO and PPC strategy to attract customers that would convert into sales.

The Results

The graph below shows how conversion rate has increased throughout the year.

Total revenue has increased by 59% when comparing year on year since the website went live. The average order value has also increased as people are spending more time on site browsing through different items and buying more.

We have achieved this result by generally improving the SEO across the website, better optimising the PPC and updating the website to a completely new design.

Do you want to increase your return on PPC investment whilst decreasing your spend or see better success from your SEO efforts? Get in contact with us today on 01227 68 68 98. Or fill out the contact form below. 

 

How to Create an Intuitive Landing Page that Converts

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Landing Pages Cause Conversion

Optimizing for conversions is the name of the game no matter what skill or discipline you happen to be employing in the realm of online marketing. Once a person lands on your website, whether it be the homepage or product specific page, how you layout your content is crucial when it comes to grabbing attention and getting people to call or opt in for more engagement with your brand.

How Much Text Should There Be?
People generally don’t come to your website to read a novel, so try not to write them one. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you need to make a site minimal, but instead try and find a way to strike the perfect balance of text. Information is best digested in small bites, along with clearly designated headlines to make scanning easy. Indicators with small sections of text are optimal for the layout of a successful landing page.

Make it clear to people that they are in right place with very strong, concise, and relevant messaging above the fold. You only have a matter of seconds to grab and keep someone’s attention. This doesn’t mean just having a fancy picture and an arrow pointing to a “REQUEST A QUOTE NOW” button. Those elements need to be part of the overall layout in some fashion, but there needs to be adequate information and substance to accompany the concise intuitive layout that is geared specifically in order to convert quickly.

Make it Intuitive!
Intuitive landing pages simplify the process of encouraging your users to take action. Visitors to your website should quickly grasp what they are looking for on your website. This content should be tailored to their search habits and be coupled with an incentive to reach out to you for more information.

In the case of Verve Medical Cosmetics, the goal or conversion is to get users to sign up or call for a free consultation.

Someone searching for a Botox Doctor in NYC clicks on our ad for Verve Medical Cosmetics Botox Cosmetic treatment. Since traffic from pay-per-click marketing usually yields a more qualified lead, the user is looking for a very specific product or service like Botox treatments. A landing page should feature clear messaging with supportive talking points and actual patient photos, all driving users towards a prominent call to action.

What is Your Value Proposition?
To stand out from the competition, the value of your brand needs to be visually apparent and expressed as vividly as possible to users without cluttering the page with text. In this case, we chose to highlight the literal value of the invitation to Botox specials. This is a great offer and is unique to new clients. Above the fold we have a free consultation, and below we have a series of great specials. This is what sets Verve apart from the competition.

A Trusted Source…
If they are still undecided, the substantive supporting text below the fold must establish your credibility with strong and informative text. The image below shows the informative text below the fold. In this example we have content that explains the service and validates their practice with Botox info, doctor certifications and other relevant information. This supportive content is what leads people to convert.

Trust and credibility factors are well represented in the citation from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery on the popularity of Botox Cosmetic, as well as in informative sections about the product and what you can expect from it. Also, integrating Google Maps with the locations section of the page illustrates how local your company really is. When targeting the competitive NYC area, this proximity factor is another selling point to convert.

In this case, it’s a doctor that is administering the products and treatment with said product. He is the determining factor for trust. Taking this into consideration, we placed his credentials just below the image you see above, right below text that reads: “MEET DR. BRACCI.” When new patients come to the office for the first time they meet Dr. Bracci in person, so we wanted to show him! His picture, combined with his accreditations, clearly demonstrate his training, experience, and professionalism.

Intuitive and Informative Landing Pages Work
Verve Medical Cosmetics is a great example of using landing page strategy and content to convert. For SEO purposes, original content that supports the main call(s)-to-action are always recommended. Utilize H tags that complement the keyword funnel with purpose and always aim to inform the user. The results prove that PPC landing pages are effective when they are concise, informative, and intuitive with a direct call to action.

What results you ask? The Verve Medical Cosmetics landing page went from zero conversions from Jan. 1st 2013 to March 1st with its previous template to 16 conversions with our new landing page since March 1st 2013. Through a combination of form submissions and phone calls, the new landing page helped Verve Medical Cosmetics to a 1,600% increase in conversions in just three months’ time.

 

How to CRO and Look Good in The Process

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CRO Process Featured Image

I was performing conversion rate optimization tests before I even knew what they were. Fresh out of college, I found myself mercilessly pounding the pavement in a quest for my first job. I went on dozens of interviews those first couple of months out of undergrad, all with conversion rates of less than zero.

Wanting success and finding none, I quickly started tweaking aspects of my interview experience to see if any of the changes netted a beneficial impact. Blue tie over red? Open suit jacket versus buttoned? Hair slicked back or parted?

Personal CRO Test
While I never actually wore a tank top and a baseball hat to an interview, I did quickly find that how I dressed to go to my interviews drastically changed my luck in the job market. Just like that – boom. CRO in action. I like to tell myself that eventually the reams of mini data I gathered were enough to land me my first job (or I just got lucky).

When performed correctly and efficiently, CRO tests on your website can net you a variety of benefits, but you’re going to want to make sure you know what you’re doing before you get started. Keeping the following points in mind before running your first tests will drastically help.

#1. Understand What a Conversion is for You

Knowing what constitutes a conversion is the first step, and it is not always as obvious as you might think. Are you tracking placed orders? Newsletter sign-ups? Booked appointments? Examine your site and take stock of every potential action you are asking of a site visitor. Ascertain which is the most important and set that as your main conversion to track.

Once you’ve figured out what a conversion means for your business, examine the steps that users have to take to convert. More often than not it is the buttons, fonts, and colors that users have to navigate with to achieve a conversion that you will want to tweak in order to increase your conversion rate.

#2 Test Multiple Variables at Once

Text color and size, message prominence, form placement, copy positioning and image use are all variables that can have subtle, yet measurable effects on how willing a person is to convert on your site. You’ll want to make sure you test all of these. There are three types of test you can perform:

  • Time-split
  • A/B Tests
  • Multivariate

Time-splits are generally regarded as not efficient, and A/B tests are solid, but don’t provide the wealth of insight multivariate testing offers. You’ll definitely want to test multiple variables at once if you want to make large changes to an entire page – particularly if each individual element you are testing is relatively minor on its own.

There are programs that are great for these types of tasks, namely Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely, and if you’re looking for a free option, Google offers Google Content Experiments as well.

#3 Know What to Do with Your Information

So you run a bunch of tests and gleam lots of useful data for your site. You’re seeing that your conversion rates are improving and your cost per acquisition has dropped, netting you extra budget. What to do now? Use the money you’re saving on other marketing channels or media. Perhaps you can partition off funds to promote yourself via Adwords campaigns, or invest into print or more traditional media. Partner your conversion data with site usability surveys to add a qualitative aspect to your quantitative data. Or, keep performing CRO tests on important variables of your website. There’s always room to improve.

Engaging in CRO tests forces you to take a very hard look at your website and understand exactly what it’s conveying to the world and how the world is responding to it. Whether you’re a start-up with a tiny budget or an established company with decades of experience, the knowledge you gain from these tests can make your website run smoother, provider a better user experience, and net you money!

 

How to Create Stellar Landing Page Copy that Converts

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Landing Page Copy Featured Image

No matter how you’ve driven traffic to your landing page, whether through PPC, Social, or Email, it’s essential to create stellar copy that will make your traffic convert. It doesn’t matter what the end-goal conversion is: crisp, catchy, and minimal copy will drive your traffic down the funnel. If your traffic is coming through organically, that’s another story, and we’ll get to that in a bit.

All landing page copy is cobbled out of four distinct parts: the header, where your visitors will immediately learn what you’re offering; the summary, where they’ll learn more about your product; value propositions, where you’ll convince them that your product is better than your competition; and the call to action, or CTA, where they’ll convert.

In all cases, before writing your copy, you have to know who your audience is, which channel the traffic will come through, and what your audience is looking for. Understanding the demographic and expectations of your audience is essential in writing great copy that speaks directly to their intent, converting them quickly.

Your landing page will be the culmination of months of researching your audience through Google Analytics demographics and interests (below), surveying your audience through email or directly on the site, competitor research, and researching the audience specific to the industry you’re promoting.

Audience Interets
While you can still write great landing page copy without this information, it’s best practice to commit substantial time to establish your audience’s identity and needs to result in the highest number of conversions possible.

Our Example

For the sake of this blog post, let’s create an example. Let’s say that your business specializes in B2B payment solutions, providing call centers, mobile payments, and payment processing. Your audience consists of small business owners and utility companies looking to reduce the expense of paper bills and make payments easier. The specific product you’re promoting is a text-based payment system called Text2Pay that reminds customers when payments are due and allows them to pay their bills with a single message.

Let’s also say you’ve written an email blast announcing the new service, which you’ll send to customers who’ve previously requested additional product information. The call to action will have customers download a demo to learn more about the product. Your traffic will funnel through your email, and your landing page will be the conversion point, so we’ll tailor the page for this purpose.

What We Know

We know that the audience has already visited your site, and that they’re interested in payment solutions. Because they provided their email address, they’ve already shown intent, and possibly purchased products in the past. This means that they:

  • Are current or potential customers
  • Are small business or utility company managers
  • Know your brand
  • Have a need for payment solutions

Now that you’ve written your email, determined your audience, and know who will receive it, it’s time to write the page.

Landing Page Header Copy

It all starts with the header, which should tell your visitor immediately what the page is, what it does, and what you want them to do. Any savvy marketer knows that a visitor’s eye is drawn immediately toward the top left corner, making your header the most important part of the page.

We need to tell them immediately what your product does and what it can do for them:

Reduce late payments and paper costs with Text2Pay.

Here we’ve chosen the two most important value propositions for your customers. They’ll save money and reduce missed payments with this new service, and every company likes to save money. In addition, we’ve worked in two reasons why they should try your product as well as the product name in eight words. Because we’ve peaked their curiosity, the next question your customer will have is, “What is Text2Pay?” That’s where the summary will come in.

Landing Page Summary Copy

Here’s where you tell them a little bit more about your product. Generally consisting of 2-3 lines, it should fully encapsulate the product and make it sound like the only option for your customer’s needs. Our goal is to get them down the page, so we have to keep it short, simple, and catchy:

Text2Pay is a text-based payment solution that reduces payment delinquency, providing payment security and convenience for your customers. Remind subscribers when payments are due and receive their payments 24/7. Download your demo today to learn how Text2Pay works for your business.

In three short lines, we’ve repeated the name of the product, added two additional value propositions while underscoring the first, explained how the product works, and told them what the conversion will be. We’ve also worked in the word “subscribers,” cutting out the need for an explanation of the subscription process. We’ll get to that later, explaining the product in detail when the customer converts at the bottom of the page.

Most importantly, we’ve let the customer know what they’re expected to do before they read the value propositions. That way, your customer doesn’t have to decide immediately whether they want to convert. We have a little more time to convince them. Now let’s hammer home what makes this product unique.

Value Propositions

This is where your traffic will learn why your product is better than the competition. It will consist of 4-5 short and unique value propositions, leading the eye down a bulleted list and toward the conversion button. Your customer is now on step three of the process, so we need to get them excited about the opportunity and ready to press that button:

  • Eliminate the expenses of paper bills
  • SMS platform guarantees text message delivery
  • Adheres to FCC regulations for secure processing
  • Payments processed in real time

With these four value propositions, we’ve told them they’ll save money, the service is reliable and secure, and there’s no delay in processing. We’ve positioned this product as a safe and convenient way for customers to pay bills that will save money and result in fewer delinquencies, which is good for the company and the customer. Now we just have to convert them.

Call to Action

Your conversion button should tell your audience what to do next. There’s no need for additional copy here, just a few controlled words to take them to the next step and convert them. While it may be tempting to try something like “Save Money Now” or “Make Payments Easier,” there’s no need to add another value proposition. It not only sounds hokey, but by adding a specific value proposition to the button, you’re focusing the customer on one point in which he or she may not be interested, leading to fewer conversions. It’s best to go with something simple and elegant that tells the story, in this case something like:

Download Your Demo

By clicking the button, your customers will download a demo that gives an in-depth explanation of the product and features. Congratulations, you’ve begun converting your customers and selling more products.

A Note on Organic Landing Pages

Landing Page Optimization
While this post focuses specifically on paid and email traffic, the same rules apply for organic landing pages. The biggest difference is that these pages exist as an island outside of your website, and don’t need to conform to the standards and format of other pages. Generally, this is the only page your customer will see before they convert, so you’re able to optimize it for conversions however you wish.When writing organic landing pages, they must exist on your site as a natural extension of your content and theme. Generally, organic landing pages are longer and more in depth, as your customer will visit them by navigating through other pages. They haven’t yet displayed the intent of paid and email visitors, and will take additional time, copy, and value propositions to convert.

For more help with writing great copy for your business check out our copywriting page. If you have any questions or comments about creating great landing page copy, let us know

 

Expert Tips on How To Increase Click Through Rate on Emails

Posted on by Zafer

how-to-increase-click-through-rates

Nearly all industries and businesses use email marketing as a way to reach their audience. And it’s no wonder why–as email users, most of us are constantly connected, checking our inbox on desktops and mobile devices multiple times a day. By reaching users on devices that are just a touch or click away, marketers hold a major advantage if this initiative is properly utilized and appropriately implemented.

email_marketing_industry

Email allows you to draw attention to any specific asset of your business. Whether you’re trying to drive immediate sales, remind users of an event, or bring traffic to a distinct page on your website, email marketing is often the best way to do so.If you have significant value to offer users, then the advantages of email marketing may seem endless. However, as a platform it won’t be effective if the message isn’t being opened or clicked on. In order for email marketing to be a successful channel, and for your click-through-rate to be significant enough to produce results, apply as many best practices as you can to your efforts.

We’ve asked some top digital marketing experts at our digital agency for insights, and have looked to outside experts at some top organizations to find out what their best tips are for producing emails with high click-through-rates:

1. Customer Logic

Bryan Clayton, CEO at Greenpal, points out the worth of thinking about your audience when you’re crafting emails, and suggests asking people unfamiliar with the content for feedback on how it reads:

“The biggest mistake we were making when crafting our emails was that we were using company logic as opposed to customer logic. You really need to put yourself in the mind of your customer when crafting your emails. Run your email copy by friends, and strangers. Get feedback because it’s so challenging to get out of your own skin.”

-Bryan Clayton, CEO, Greenpal

2. Timing Matters

Finding the best time to send emails to individual users will provide the best results. Austin Paley, Corporate Marketing Communications Manager at Blue Fountain Media, explains the importance of segmenting contacts with consideration for timing:

“While there are some standard times that are widely considered the ‘best’ to send emails based on vertical and email type, you should try and go beyond just finding the best time to send for most of your users and aim to send at the best possible time for each individual on your contact list. For example, if you find that most people like to open emails at 9 am, it isn’t enough to just send an email at 9 am Eastern Standard Time and call it a day. Use the information you’ve gathered in your lists to try and segment your contacts down by time zone – that way you can send to each person at 9 am in their local time. Some mailing platforms will do this for you automatically as a final step before you send – but if your email service provider doesn’t include this it can be as simple as using phone numbers or city data to figure out what state a contact is in and then adding a new time zone field manually. It can be a lot of tiring manual work, but higher open rates and better results make it more than worth it.”

-Austin Paley, Corporate Marketing Communications Manager, Blue Fountain Media

3. Think About Individual Users

It’s important to have relevant messaging, and an understanding of your users at a 1-to-1 level explains Shannon Johlic, Head of Marketing at Boomtrain. Then you can deliver only the most targeted content for that individual person:

“As email marketers, we must look to reaching the mythical segment of 1. No audiences, just individual people seeking more personal user experiences. But how do you do this? Previously thought a near impossible task, now, (thanks to machine intelligence), marketers have the opportunity to massively scale and automate not only the actual building of the emails, but the collection and processing of data that surfaces an understanding of the behavior of your subscribers/customers and a deep understanding of your content/products. This coupling of multiple layers of understanding with automation gives marketers tools that predictively populate emails with content most relevant to that individual person, and will deliver it to them at an optimal time. Powerful computers and algorithms have evolved so much that marketers are now able to distribute relevant emails as if sent by a close friend who has known that individual for years.”

-Shannon Johlic, Head of Marketing, Boomtrain

4. Quality over Quantity

Ashley Chavez, Director of Marketing at Get Smart Marketing explains that sending emails to a ton of leads that aren’t necessarily qualified is far less effective than sending to a smaller, qualified group:

“As a marketer, it is your goal to influence a consumer’s purchase decisions. Email is a powerful tool that helps marketers connect with consumers, delivering them useful and relevant content right to their inbox. So, it seems logical that the more people you can contact, the better your chances are at sending qualified leads to sales. However, more doesn’t always mean better. Adding unqualified leads to your nurture campaigns, won’t help close more sales. Grow your email list the smarter way by serving personalized sign up forms only to visitors who haven’t opted in and that fit within one of your target audience personas.”

-Ashley Chavez, Director of Marketing, Get Smart Content

5. Code Images

Andrew Jung, Corporate Marketing Associate at Blue Fountain Media suggests always defining your image sizes in your coding, and labeling them with alt image tags for the best user-experience:

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“If your images don’t render in your clients’ email platform, your email will display as an assortment of random white boxes and could come across as spam. By having the image sizes defined with alt image tags in your coding, it ensures that the layout of your email will retain its shape without being jumbled together and your alt tag images will explain and help identify what each white box is. This does not seem like a huge difference to you, but putting in the extra effort can be the decisive factor that might sway your clients to load those images and actually read and react to your email.”

-Andrew Jung, Corporate Marketing Associate, Blue Fountain Media

6. Align Content with the Buyer Process

Aligning content with the buying cycle is crucial for every company and should be a focus of any successful email marketing campaign. Troy O’Bryan, CEO at Response Capture explains how organizations should consider where the user is in the buying process when crafting their emails:

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“Each stage of the A.C.T. (Awareness, Consideration, Transaction) Model represents a different part of their journey and the content should be reflective. For example, if a prospect visits the “request a demo” page on your website, they are already in the Consideration stage. A case study or expert guide would be great content for your follow-up email strategy. By tailoring the content to fit the wants and needs of the buyer, they will be more likely to respond because you are providing something of value.”-Troy O’Bryan, CEO, Response Capture

7. What’s the CTA?

Having a strong Call-To-Action allows marketers to encourage users to take a desired action that brings them further into the conversion funnel. Saurbah Nangia, CEO & Founder at Targeting Mantra suggests making the CTA of your email your core focus:

“Marketers should focus on the CTA that goes with the email. Whether it is a template or a simple HTML message, your email focus should be on the CTA you are including in the mail. This is because you have just 1-8 seconds to catch the attention of the reader and you should be able to direct the reader in split seconds what you want him/her to do.”

-Saurbah Nangia, CEO & Founder, Targeting Mantra

8. Testing

Like all other marketing tactics, in order to understand what’s going to resonate best with your users and what types of email messages they’re most likely to open and click through, you need to do some testing. Jeff Tomlin, CMO of Vendasta Technologies highlights the importance of this in his tip:

“Get them into the email. First, you’ve got to get people to open the email and they choose in milliseconds whether to do so or to delete based only on who sent it what the subject line is. So make both count. Remember, emails coming from a person usually perform better than those coming from an entity. And while there are plenty of guidelines on creating open-worthy subject lines, if you’re looking for the BEST subject line, you need to test. Test. Test. And, you got it, test.”

-Jeff Tomlin, CMO, Vendasta Technologies

9. Videos

Owner at The Media Captain says his team has had great success with embedding videos in their email marketing, and suggests using it as an opportunity to engage users in a way that many companies don’t:

“When you mention “video” in the title it typically has a higher open rate percentage. We will then embed the video within the email blast and when people click on it, it drives them to a landing page specific to the email marketing message that we’re delivering.”

-Jason Parks, Owner, The Media Captain

10. Build Consistent Confidence

If you’re not delivering in content, you likely will not be converting clicks. Owen Powis, Founder and CEO of Mailflow, stresses the importance of instilling confidence in your users:

“Focus on creating the best possible experience, and people will click when they have confidence that the email will contain something they want to see. If they know when you send them an offer it’s always a great offer they are far more likely to check it out. The more effort you put into creating a fantastic campaign that genuinely benefits your audience the better your CTR will become. This is a far healthier and longer term strategy than just looking at making the subject line stand out.”

-Owen Powis, Founder and CEO, Mailflow

Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best marketing tactics for reaching an audience, and boosting a brand’s ROI. To understand if your efforts are paving the way for your business, take a look at your key performance indicators and examine your open-rates and click-through-rates to identify areas of improvement. If you’d like to enhance the overall performance of your email marketing, and increase your click-through-rates, incorporate some of our experts’ ideas throughout your next campaign.

 

Domain Migration Tips To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

Posted on by Zafer

SEO_website_redesign

Rebranding is one of the most common marketing initiatives for businesses, and can occur for many reasons. Whether it is an attempt to dissociate with the performance of the past or to simplify the brand, this marketing tactic can be very effective if approached properly.

Some notable brands have undergone this process including Comcast’s rebranding to Xfinity, and the British Overseas Airway Corporation’s (BOAC) rebranding to British Airways. In the digital world, Quantum Computer Services successfully changed its name to America Online in 1991–and even Google rebranded from their original name, BackRub.

While rebrandings can be very profitable, it requires a very complex interplay of resources to be successful. One of those resources is search engines and the way they manage a change in domain. In some cases, the original brand has such a strong online presence that a Google search will still return several pages and results before the actual current page. BOAC returns several Wikipedia pages and YouTube video results before you start seeing the current brand’s site, British Airways. On the other hand, if you do a search for Comcast, you’ll find paid and organic results for Xfinity.com occupying the first two ranking positions and the Wikipedia page for Comcast down at position 5.

SEO Preservation

SEO Preservation can be a broad term that may include a variety of performance indicators including page-rank, traffic, ranking keywords, online purchases, bookings, and many more. When SEO preservation is not a key factor throughout domain migration or the URL restructuring process, there are some key lessons that can be learned. As search engine optimizers, we understand that often other factors like time-resources, budget, other marketing efforts, or even client buy-in to the SEO process may inhibit the preservation process. Brands that have failed at this process chose to focus on other priorities during their website migration process, and unfortunately, as a result they have seen dramatic dips in their site performance.

To highlight this, consider the following example. This company, started with 2,100 keywords ranking in the top 20 search results before the domain change and one month later saw a 40% drop to fewer than 1,400 terms in April.

Domain_Migration_Keyword_Drop
Another “nightmare scenario” for SEO is to have domain migration occur so that both domains remain live for some time and links connect the old and new sites back and forth. To avoid this, coordinate the shift all at once because the existence of two live domains with substantial amounts of duplicate content and partial implementation of redirects will send conflicting signals to search engines about which site should rank. Consequently, the domain authority is then split instead of shifted from the old domain to the new one. In some cases we’ve seen domain authority drops for both the old and the new domain.

To illustrate this, consider this example below. Average daily site visits dropped in half due to falling organic traffic when the site no longer ranked for terms that they dominated only weeks before.

Domain_Migration_Organic_Traffic

Rebrandings with SEO in Mind

What steps do you need to plan ahead for, in order to minimize the chance of these drops impacting your business?

There are 6 critical components to maintaining domain authority, digital presence, and accurate tracking of the domain migration. Some of which impact how the domain is perceived and some are related to how the migration is tracked. Keep in mind these crucial elements if your preparing for a rebranding:

  1. Redirects
  2. Resubmit Sitemap
  3. Directory Listings
  4. Social Media
  5. Analytics and Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) Profiles
  6. Audit Redirects

Redirects

The most obvious first step is to put in place redirects which automatically route a user from the old domain and page to the new one. There are a range of types of redirects that are available, but for these types of redirects, a 301 is best. A 301 status communicates to search engines and web browsers that the page has been permanently relocated and redirects the user to the correct page. A 301 redirect also transfers ranking power (sometimes called “link juice”) that the legacy page had built up to the new page.

In order to identify every page on the site that needs to be redirected, several tools, including Xenu Link Sleuth, Screaming Frog, Integrity for Mac, are available to “crawl” the legacy site. Pay special attention to URLs that have the most in-bound links, or receive the highest volume of inbound traffic from other sites. These pages are home to most of the site’s “link juice” and must be maintained. Tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer, Google Search Console and Majestic SEO, can be used to compare and make sure that nothing gets skipped or overlooked.

Once the list of legacy pages is complete they must be mapped to pages on the new site and redirected. A simple way to help you do this is to create an excel file listing the old URL’s in one column and the new ones in another. It also helps for verification purposes later.

It’s important to be prepared to make all of the changes at once instead of drifting a handful of pages at a time. Leaving both domains live sends conflicting signals to search engines and can damage the domain authority of both the legacy and new domains.

Resubmit Sitemap

Once the redirects have been implemented it’s important to notify Google and Bing Webmaster Tools that a change of address is happening. Leave the old site’s XML sitemap live for about a week after the migration so crawlers can still access it, follow the links therein through the 301 redirects, and start working the old URLs out of their indexes.

Create a XML sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools/Search Console. Typically, it can take a day or two before the new crawl takes effect and you can compare the number of indexed pages.

Directory Listings

Along with inbound links, directory listings are one of top sources used by both search engines and users to find a website or domain. It’s considered best SEO practice to make certain that listings in online and print directories are current and accurate. A domain migration requires returning to all of the directories that list the legacy domain and updating them to reflect the new address. These directories may include (most generically) FourSquare, InfoGroup, Localeze, YP.com, City Search, and DMOZ. An aggregation tool like MozLocal can help bring all of these directories into alignment.

In addition to the generic directories most businesses have an opportunity to be listed in industry-specific directories. From auto-dealers to law firms or home maintenance professionals, you’ll likely find a set of available directories. The longer a legacy domain has been in existence, the more directories that will subsequently need to be updated.

Social Media

There is a strong correlation between social media engagement and web traffic. Announcing and publicizing the domain name change to provide important social signals and promote the rebranding in its own right. This will generate higher than usual volumes of traffic to the new domain in order to compensate for the potential drop in organic traffic while Google is indexing the new domain. While it isn’t critical to update all legacy posts with a new domain, it’s crucial to make sure that any pages that have social media links to them are correctly redirected. Update social media profiles, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google +, but don’t neglect LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger, YouTube and any others that are connected to the website.

Analytics and Search Console Profiles

The profiles in an analytics package, whether it is Google Analytics or a fee-for-service provider, will track the traffic to a specific domain, and if it’s set up correctly should not be tracking activity on other domains. In the Admin tab of Google Analytics, the property name and default URL should be updated to reflect the new domain. This is also the time to annotate Google Analytics in order to track the date of the migration.

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In addition to Google Analytics it’s important to update settings in Google Search Console, only AFTER the migration has occurred.

1. On the Search Console homepage, click the name of the legacy site.
2. Click the gear icon; then click change of address.
3. Follow the instructions in the change of site address tool.
4. Monitor site traffic as indicated in move a site with URL changes.

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Audit Redirects

Once everything is complete, it’s important to verify that everything is working as expected. The Screaming Frog web spider tool can help run an audit of the old and new site to examine the results.

1. Upload: The legacy URL’s

Switch the SEO Spider to ‘List Mode,” select the file with all the old URLs to audit and upload.

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This is where the log that was saved from step 1, redirects comes back into play.

2. Select: The ‘Always Follow Redirects’ box

Navigate to the ‘Advanced’ tab inside the ‘Spider Configuration’ and select the ‘Always Follow Redirects‘ option.

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As default ‘List Mode’ works at a 0 crawl depth, meaning it just crawls the URLs included in the upload. With this feature selected, it ignores depth and will follow redirects until the final destination (a no response, 2XX, 4XX or 5XX etc.).

3. Start the crawl

Now hit the ‘Start’ button let the SEO Spider crawl the site, reach 100%, and come to a stop.

4. Click on ‘Reports’ & ‘Redirect Chains’

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This report does not just include URLs which have redirect chains, it includes every URL in the original upload and the response in a single export. If a URL has multiple redirects in a chain, this export will map out each hop along the way, redirect 1, to redirect 2, to redirect 3, and all the responses along the way until the final target. It will also show how many hops there are (remember 5+ Google might give up and treat as a 404) and identify any pesky redirect loops.

This report provides a comprehensive method to audit all redirects in a site migration in a nice, easy, single export.

Effective Domain Migration To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

While there are a lot of steps in this process and many intricate details to pay attention to, with preparation and a clearly outlined plan it can be possible to identify unexpected behavior or disparities before they have a notable impact on traffic and visitors. Following the steps to update analytics packages and audit redirects will help identify opportunities to make changes before they become problems.

Now, go forth and change that domain!

 

Instagram for Business: 5 Tips for Effective Advertising

Posted on by Zafer

Instagram_For_Business_Advertising

Social media advertising is on the rise, and more and more social media platforms are providing advertisers with the capability to advertise on each individual platform to best reach their target audience within a specific channel. Instagram has officially joined the game, and with an expected growth to hit over 100 million users by 2018, it’s an obvious decision for relevant businesses to utilize the new advertising options that have been made available.

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So, what kind of businesses should consider advertising on Instagram?Instagram is an incredibly visual-centric social platform, ultimately providing users with appealing imagery that is highly engaging and shareable. With the capabilities to Like, Comment, and Share the content posted by other users, your content’s reach is organically extended to a large portion of the Instagram network.

Businesses with captivating imagery, product photos, and lifestyle-based content (think company events, flowers in the office, happy hour) are able to give their target audience a glimpse inside the brand on the Instagram platform. This “point-of-view” strategy allows users to better understand the background of the business, get to know their employees, how their products are made, and obtain a behind the scenes look at the company – building trust and forging brand loyalty in the process. Fashion companies, lifestyle brands, bloggers, magazines, and other businesses with strong imagery to share tend to be the most successful on the Instagram platform.

Instagram has made an atmosphere for marketers to create a close bond with consumers via mobile devices. With a less conventional content concept in comparison to other traditional advertisements, this form of social engagement can significantly increase digital visibility. The platform offers similar characteristics to Twitter and Facebook, yet the specific steps to connect with your audience are different. Follow these 5 tips to expand your brand reach and effectively advertise on Instagram:

1. Set Your Goals

For any social media advertising initiative, defining your goal should be the first step; followed by the strategy to reach these goals (targeting, content to be shared, brand voice, etc.), which should be built with these objectives top of mind.

Is your brand interested in advertising on Instagram to build out their following? Is the business launching in the US market and seeking to expand brand awareness throughout the country? Is the company launching a new line and seeking to leverage the existing audience of their current, well-established line? Once the goals for your advertising efforts are identified, your business can move towards the execution of the advertising campaign.

2. Establish Your Point of View

With a strong visual presence on the platform, Instagram uses imagery (and the use of some text and hashtags as well) to deliver messaging to users. Businesses must create a brand strategy unique to each social platform, and specifically on Instagram, decide what specific “point of view” they would like to convey to their target audience. Think sneak peek into the showroom, the latest celebrity look from the brand, or a look inside the factory where products are manufactured. Once a brand’s point of view strategy is established, the content strategy should be built to support it.

3. Create A Content Strategy

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Supporting the goals and point of view previously established by your business, your content strategy should go hand in hand with the two. Within the content strategy, you’ll want to tell a story to users on the platform. Keep in mind, users on each social media platform are unique, so the content strategy across social platforms should vary a bit, while aiming to maintain an overall consistent brand voice across all channels. By analyzing the success of each post, you will be able to best determine what works best in terms of content, and optimize your efforts accordingly.

4. Utilize Hashtags

Leverage the organic reach of your posts with the use of relevant and trending hashtags. Instagram’s resources provide inspiration for ways to best use hashtags to connect with the community and extend your brand’s reach.

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5. Continue Improving

In both organic posts and advertising efforts, the success of each should be analyzed and reported on regularly to best determine what works best and what kind of posts don’t perform as well for your specific brand. Maybe the use of a specific hashtag resulted in 30% more engagement on two similar posts, or maybe a specific image type generated noticeably higher results. By analyzing and understanding the success of your efforts, your brand is able to optimize posts accordingly to help foster the best results possible.

Instagram for Business

Instagram is a highly visual social media platform, and it provides brands with the ability to share their point of view with the world. With advertising capabilities being extended to more businesses, we expect to see immense growth on the platform. By following these 5 tips for effective Instagram advertising, your brand’s content strategy and advertising efforts will boost the success of your social media efforts.

 

What Is a Responsive Web Design: Understanding the Basics

Posted on by Zafer

Responsive_Website_Design

Today, as users, we’re constantly on-the-go. The majority of website visits start on mobile devices, and according to eMarketer, Mcommerce sales for US retail will be increasing with each coming year. As a result, optimizing website accessibility and user experience on tablets, smartphones, and every device imaginable is becoming increasingly important in order for all businesses to stay relevant. To accommodate users, websites that are designed responsively are typically the best option available.

Responsive_Design_and_Growing_Mobile_Users
Responsive design is an approach to web development by which a website is planned, designed, and developed to appear optimally in a range of devices. The phrase “appear optimally” refers to a page being readable, easy-to-navigate, and usable with minimal panning and scrolling. Responsive Design is not just a method or technique – it is a fundamental ideology about how a site is designed and built.

What Is A Responsive Web Design?

Responsive design is a front-end development process intended for molding website design and user experience to the user’s device, whether desktop, tablet, or mobile.

In responsive, a cascading style sheet (CSS)—essentially what defines the format and layout of a web page, is leveraged to permit a website to scale to the width of a browser, independent of device type. Javascript and js libraries such as JQuery and Modernizr are also used to accompany this behavior for resizing more dynamic objects like masonry galleries as well as converting mouse activities to touch activities.

Unlike adaptive design or mobile detection, responsive design does not leverage device detection, so rather than querying the device with backend logic, CSS media queries are used to determine things like the width and orientation of the device screen—your browser.

Basics of Responsive Design

Two basic principles exist in responsive design, the use of breakpoints and fluid scaling:

Breakpoints

CSS3 media queries create conditional boundaries at which the width of a specific device type’s browser will then trigger alternate styles. Here at Web Designer Vip, we generally use maximum-width breakpoint, to create a desktop-first (scale down) build versus a minimum-width boundary, for a mobile-first (scale up) build. Queries can also be used to determine height and even device orientation.

Breakpoint sizes (we’ll use widths from here on out) can be set in px or em. The differentiation in modern browsers is negligible, though, compared to a few years back. Breakpoints can be set at any size but they tend to align with the most common dimensions of each Desktop, Tablet Portrait, Mobile Landscape, and Mobile Portrait. Generally speaking, these tend to be 1200/960px, 768px, 480px, and 320px, wide respectively, though industry standards are constantly changing as new devices are released.

Over the years, these types of devices have begun to blend into one another, especially with the introduction of retina displays. As a result, you might find two devices can match the same breakpoint (ie. tablet landscape and laptop) but might also find that a particular device has a unique size, so that’s where the next principle comes into play.

Fluidity

Fluid scaling can be achieved in a few different ways, but it will always involve percentage or em values to permit a container to scale within the bounds of its parent elements, and ultimately the browser. Fluid scaling is necessary to achieve responsiveness between breakpoints, to maximize your real estate, as well as to maintain the flow of columns in a responsive grid.

A simple example of a fluidly scaling object would be an HTML page consisting of one block with width of 100% and a height of “auto”. As the browser changes width, the block scales with it, proportionally. Where you choose to apply this scaling at the granular level is up to you but fluidity should always exist at the top level of any responsive container.

Another popular example of fluidity is a grid layout. In a grid layout, virtual blocks are aligned and evenly distributed over the width of the body of a site or container. These blocks are fixed in width, aligned as inline-blocks, with a parent container which is fluidly scaling. By doing tis, when the browser (and ultimately, the container) reaches the point at which the sum of all blocks exceeds its parent container, the blocks break to the next line. These blocks are referred to as columns and each block could also represent a number of columns.

For instance, if you have 3 blocks, they could represent 9 columns, at 3 columns each. Once you’ve scaled down to a width that fits 2 blocks, at 3 columns each, with the 3rd on the next row, you’re now looking at an 8 column layout, with 2 columns of margin. Scale down further to close out the margin and you’re looking at a 6 column layout with no margin.

Design

Grid layouts may also be used across an entire website, including sidebars and body content. As a result, many websites are designed on grids, flowing from left to right, top to bottom (just like germanic and latin-based written languages).

In order to present the optimally responsive layout for a grid, we start by selecting the known device widths from our knowledge of breakpoints. Using these figures, we calculate the nearest figure of the site width and number of columns, which divide into the greatest number of whole factors. We must do this without compromising the content’s real estate much (so don’t go overboard). One of the most popular systems is the 960grid system, which is often used in 12 columns. Two side-by-side blocks taking up the full width of a page is therefore each 6 and 6 columns respectively, in a 12 column grid.

12_Column_Grid
 

Photo Credit: Tutsplus.com

When designing and developing for responsive, we place emphasis on retaining the structure and order of elements from desktop through mobile. This permits fluid scaling while also reducing unnecessary load of duplicate elements that are hidden or shown at specific breakpoints.

Responsive Design at Web Designer Vip

At Web Designer Vip, our 2015 standards for responsive design include options for a standard 960 grid, requiring designs for desktop and mobile, as well as a widescreen 1200px or 1280px grid requiring designs for widescreen, tablet or 960, and mobile. All interim stages are either snapped via breakpoints, to the next breakpoint size, or fluidly scaling – the complexity of the design and scope of the project will dictate that decision.

Our talented development team includes full stack developers as well as frontend specialists, all of whom are trained in responsive practices and are evaluated on a quarterly basis. We perform quality checks of all the major browsers and aforementioned breakpoint widths both manually and using a proprietary screenshotting service built off of PhantomJs, as well as with manual device testing with our in-house QA engineers.

Optimizing User-Experience

Regardless of your industry or the products and services your company offers, user-experience on your website should be of the utmost importance. With responsive design, your audience will always be able to engage seamlessly with your site on each of their devices, at any given time. Mobile and tablet use is becoming more and more prevalent, and to succeed with your online presence, your website should be optimized for those devices and their users.

 

10 Tips to Enhance Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Posted on by Zafer

SEO Tips

In the digital marketing space, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) has become one of the leading areas to hone in on if you’re seeking some major growth for your company. Whether your brand is facing a lot of competition, or is looking to bring in some more sales, employing the best SEO practices can provide you with the results your brand is seeking.

However, to effectively benefit from SEO, you need to consider which tactics will provide you with the highest ROI and are also completely aligned with search engine regulations and rules. Black-hat SEO tactics, which aren’t geared towards a legitimate user audience and are more focused for search engines, will get you penalized with Google, and likely result in your organization being removed from search results altogether.

From tips related to website design to the proper way to build out your keywords, we’ve spoken with our team of SEO experts atWeb Designer Vip, as well as some experts at outside organizations, to understand which methods some of the top companies are recommending when it comes to properly optimizing your website for search engines. Take a look at the ten tips below and see how you can incorporate them into your overall business plan and SEO strategy.

1. Generate Content Ideas through Auto Fill

To rank well for SEO you need great content ideas. Your blog and web pages should be “bookmark worthy” explains Andrew Nguyen, Content Marketer at Bizible. However, sometimes coming up with the ideas for content that you know will rank well isn’t very simple. Nguyen explains how to discover strong content ideas in his tip below:

SEO_Tips_Content

“One way to help your brand come up with web content that provides value is by using Google’s auto fill feature. Auto fill is the list of search queries that Google predicts and lists for you when you type in a keyword. It’s a helpful feature to save people time, and it’s also great for marketers who need content ideas. Here’s how:

  1. Get a list of keywords you want to rank for.
  2. Enter it into the Google search bar.
  3. Then add a letter of the alphabet. For example, type “online marketing” + “a” and you’ll see a list of search queries where the next word starts with the letter “a.”
  4. Write down the suggested search queries that might be good to create content around. Even if you aren’t sure you’re going to write about these topics, record them anyway. You want to create a big list to reference whenever you run out of content ideas.
  5. Do this for every letter of the alphabet. For example, “online marketing” + “b,” “online marketing” +”c” and etc.”

2. Pay Attention to Algorithm Updates

The formula that Google uses to rank web pages is frequently changing. As an SEO professional, it’s vital to stay up-to-date on these algorithm updates, explains Lauren Witte, Associate Director of Marketing at JacksonWhite, P.C:

“Google changes its algorithms periodically—usually every couple of months. They typically don’t announce it too far ahead of time, and the only way you might be made aware of the change is through noticing shifts in traffic to your website. A change in the current algorithm will likely mean a necessary strategy change on your end. Subscribe to digital marketing blogs to read about others experiencing algorithm updates and learn how different businesses are adjusting.”

3. Leverage Keyword Tools

Selecting appropriate keywords for anything you produce is important because that’s how users will find you—through the terms they search. How do you determine which keywords you should go after? Anthony De Guzman, SEO Specialist at Saatchi and Saatchi Canada suggests the following:

“Search for keyword ideas in the Google Keyword Planner (AdWords), and select a few with a good average monthly search volume—and enter them into Google. Take a look at the first page results only, since that’s what you should be aiming for, and see if you can compete. Be sure to use third-party tools such as Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz to measure how authoritative they are (page authority, domain authority, citation flow, trust, flow) and determine how optimized the article is for that particular keyword.”

4. Use Google+

Google has created G+ as a way to verify and connect “entities” on the internet, and G+ Business is integrated with other Google products including Maps, G-Mail, Youtube and even the Chrome browser. Jefe Birkner, Senior SEO Specialist at Web Designer Vip, shares the importance of using this platform:

“G+ results will show up in search results and include shared endorsements when someone in a user’s network has “+1’ed” a G+ listing. Content from a website that gets shared on G+ is indexed immediately, meaning that it shows up in search results before the whole site is re-indexed.

Google+
Yes, it is one more social media platform that is requesting your attention and engagement, but this one comes from Google, and nobody loves Google products the way Google does. G+ content can show up directly in search results, in the “knowledge graph” on the right side of the screen, and in reviews in the “local pack” with local results. Remember that over 100 million people are logged into their Google accounts every day, these are potential influencers, fans and customers. Don’t let your competitor get a leg up in this area.”

5. Think about Online Communities

Often times, to improve rankings, many businesses will turn to online communities to start sharing their content. Steve Belk, Founder of CutCableToday.com has seen success in terms of rankings when using Reddit:

“I’ve noticed a direct correlation between when one of my articles goes viral on Reddit, and the speed with which it gets indexed and starts ranking. My site is barely 2 months old, and I’ve already had a couple of occasions where someone shared one of my articles on Reddit, it gained a lot of traction, and the same day it shot up to page 1 in the search results for relevant keywords. And those rankings have lasted.”

6. Building a Backlink Profile

Backlinks are a critical part of the SEO mix, but it’s also vital to understand how your page authority is handled, especially if you’re in a competitive niche. Taylor Daughtry, Digital Strategist at TaylorDaughtry.com shares insights on this:

“Google considers all the outbound links on your site just as critical as incoming links. If they’re trustworthy, high-value sites, it influences your page authority in a positive manner, and shows Google’s crawler that you’re reading and linking to other high-quality content. The easiest way to consider your outbound links is the moment you’re creating them—when you’re writing content. Be sure to use only reliable sources that themselves have a high page and domain authority, and you’ll see an increase in your own page authority. This strategy may lower your pool of available link-worthy content, but it could be just the edge you’re looking for.”

7. Quality Content Is Key

SEO is largely based on providing a positive user-experience. That being said, the content that you produce needs to be readable and digestible by users. Matthew DiCiero, SEO Associate at Web Designer Vip, describes the need for quality content below:

“For me, my number one SEO tip (especially for the future) is putting a higher importance on generating content that is digestible for consumers and search engines alike. There is more and more information supporting the idea that search engines are leaning towards algorithms that are content-driven. Identifying a content strategy that adheres to that prediction will be crucial in any digital marketing efforts and help keep you ahead of your competitors. Quality content is essential.”

8. Check for Broken Links

Checking your website for broken links is an effective way to enhance your ranking and improve the experience you provide your users with explains Flo Bejgu, SEO Manager at Inbox Translation:

“When a website redesign takes place, some URLS will change and links from other sites that point to your site might not work anymore. This is bad for both the user experience and SEO. Visitors coming from those pages will get a 404 error page, and those links won’t pass link equity. The more working backlinks to your website, the higher in search engines you will be.”

9. Mobile-Friendly Websites

Mobile-Friendly-Test

Google’s latest algorithm update, nicknamed “mobilegeddon,” is all about having a mobile-friendly website. Daniel Hickey, Director of Creative Advertising at Hickey Marketing Group recommends a responsive design:“If your website isn’t mobile-responsive, have your website redesigned so mobile users can visit your site. Because more than 30% of people use their cell phones to search the web, you could be missing out on potential clients if your website doesn’t appear in the Google mobile search results.”

10. Video Marketing

Many businesses and individuals will overlook video marketing as an effective SEO tool. Janelle Page, Founder and CEO of KickFire Marketing Agency highlights the power of video marketing:

“You can keyword rank a video faster than you can keyword rank a blog post. YouTube and Google are married so producing great video content, and then optimizing those videos, ensures you get found online. 9 out of 10 people will click on a video over a simple plain text result and YouTube is one of the fastest growing search engines.”

The right approach to SEO

The strategy you use to optimize your website for search engines should be part of your entire business plan. By including the best practices, as outlined above, you can effectively enhance your rankings, and ultimately provide a better user-experience for your target audience.

 

Conversion Funnel Optimization at Web Designer Vip’s 2015 Forum

Posted on by Zafer

Blue Fountain Media 2015 Digital Marketing Trends

Web Designer Vip held its 3rd Annual Digital Marketing Trends Forum this year at the Gansevoort Park Ave Hotel on September 16-17. In the past, the event has only been one day. However, due to a large RSVP count this was the first time the seminar was held for two days. The forum’s speakers were compromised of the Web Designer Vip team and special guest speaker, Jon-Michael Durkin, who is the Agency Development Manager at Google.

The overall focus of the seminar was to bring to light the importance of optimizing one’s conversion funnel to find the niche audience that your business can convert to long term relationship consumers which can dramatically increase your digital marketing ROI. Broken down and explained step by step, the topics ranged from finding the right leads by using Google Analytics and driving them through the conversion funnel to personalizing your online marketing through marketing automation, optimized SEO, and online advertising beyond search.

Below you can find photos, videos, and presentation slides from our forum:

Finding the Right Leads: Engaging with Digital Targeting

Jon-Michael Durkin, Agency Development Manager at Google


Durkin described the state of the consumer market in today’s world. The consumer is oversaturated with advertisements as, “the average person sees 5,000 ads every day,” Durkin said. Because of segmentation of different consumers with different needs, wants, and purchases, he explained that it wasn’t enough to market and hope for sales leads from an overarching demographic anymore. Using Google Analytics and smart insights, Durkin demonstrated how a business’ market audience can be segmented and narrowed down to a consumer profile.

Driving Leads though the Conversion Funnel

Christina Shaw, Chief Marketing Officer at Web Designer Vip


Shaw gave a deconstruction analysis of how reaching visitors earlier rather than later in the conversion funnel process could help boost sales. Despite the fact that “most websites are targeting people that are ready to buy, but lose people that might not be quite ready yet,” she pointed out that these potential buyers just need to be nudged into learning more and trusting your business. “Blogs, infographics, and quizzes are all great when buyers are still curious and learning about your brand,” she said.Shaw finished with an example of how Web Designer Vip helped make the website and landing pages of PEX Card more inviting and less forceful to potential conversions. “Web Designer Vip built out more top and middle of the funnel touch points for PEX Card and it’s starting to work.”

Using Marketing Automation to Grow Your Business

Joe DiNardo, Director of Paid Media & Social Media


By likening marketing automation with an illustration of a consumer sitting in front of a computer that was bombarding him with ads, DiNardo revealed how marketing automation should actually be called ‘marketing personalization.’ He stated that creating a marketable website with only a certain sales lead objective in mind is like having a finely, tailored suit that looks perfect to the business owner, but won’t fit or match the needs and wants of consumers.Rounding out his presentation with some eye-popping statistics, DiNardo said that, “20% of leads websites generate are sales ready. Marketing personalization can result in 50% more leads at a 30% lower cost and can lead to a 113% increase in sales leads.”

Designing Your Site for Optimal SEO Results

John Marcinuk, Director of SEO & Content


Marcinuk began his presentation with the 4 crucial key ranking factors for a business website’s SEO: visibility, usability, engagement, and authority. Having an up-to-date website isn’t enough to build and maintain high search rankings. He spoke of how potential buyers might be looking for your business online, but that it could lose out to competitors who have optimized their site for SEO more thoroughly. Despite the notion of the technical complexity of SEO such as keyword research, Marcinuk said that “keyword research is the backbone of good SEO, but it’s also the backbone of good messaging.”With the broad range of search engine optimization, he emphasized some important avenues for businesses to focus on like tagging images with meta tags, link building, and optimizing your website not only for desktop but for mobile as well.

Online Advertising Beyond Search Ads

Ashley Kemper, Senior Marketing Strategist


With the heavy competition and rising prices of search advertising like PPC, Kemper discussed how other forms of digital advertising were more cost efficient and made it easier for your company to reach out to potential consumers. “Search marketing is projected to hit $25 billion in revenue next year,” she said.Kemper showed examples of how investing in other advertising options such as display, social media, remarketing, mobile, and video were proven to be very effective. By comparing the vastly different commercials of Dyson, Kemper showed how online advertising should sometimes steer away from being so sales-oriented and serious, and instead appeal to the pathos of our human sides.

10 Marketing Strategy Elements You Need for A Website Launch

Posted on by Zafer

Strategy_Elements

Before launching a website, you must determine the qualifications a website needs in order to be successful. There are several elements that must be taken into consideration, such as; website design, content, technical logistics, marketing, and much more. The list goes on and on…

Having a well-thought out strategy is what will make all the difference with a website’s success. Without it, you’re unable to design a site that will accomplish everything a business wants to because those goals haven’t been outlined. At Web Designer Vip, our strategy department likes to take phased approaches when we build a strategy for any type of business before the launch of a website. We begin by asking questions throughout all phases of the project—before it begins, during, and after. The following is a basic “game plan” for the major components of your strategy, and the right questions to ask that will help you create the most effective strategic plan, and reach your finish line to achieve the goals of your site.

Pre Game

The discovery phase is one of the most important parts of any successful website strategy because it helps shape the fundamental aspects of your entire project. Proper research will provide you with a clear understanding of your client needs, your competitive landscape, and the unique assets your business has to offer. Without fully grasping those components, you won’t be able to identify the right business objectives or goals, and furthermore, the tactics you need to implement in order to achieve them. Three crucial strategy elements that should be considered during your initial research phase include the following:

Target_audience

1. Target Audience

  • Who are they, what will resonate with them the most?
  • How do they behave? Will it be best to market to them offline, online, or socially?

2. Industry landscape

  • Who are my top competitors in my vertical, direct, looking and goliaths alike?
  • What are the industry trends, what is driving them?

3. Differentiators

  • What is my competition not doing well that I can highlight or capitalize upon?
  • What can I offer to offset or detract from any weaknesses?

Game Time

Determining actionable tasks and goals related to your website should be based on what you ultimately want your users to do. What your audience is looking for and how you can fulfil their need should be the basis for how your website is designed. The user-experience is crucial to the success of your online business and should be tailored to meet the needs of your users. These four elements of a strategy should be examined as you’re creating your website:

Social_integration

4. Social Integration

  • Do I want posts to link to landing pages or just get the word out?
  • How much interaction or commenting do I want between the company and customers? Does it need to be monitored?

5. Content Offerings

  • Am I a catalogue, resource center, thought leadership portal, mix?
  • How do I avoid dead ends and supplement with related upsells?

6. Conversion & CTAs

  • What do I want users to do, buy, share, download, comment, or post?
  • How do I prompt them to do so? With links, buttons, pop ups, and at what stage of interest?

7. Online Environment

  • What are my users looking to do? Browse, buy, learn, or reach out?
  • What atmosphere are they expecting any offline sites or other materials?

Post Game

After the launch of a website, you’re not done yet. In order to stay relevant and continue enhancing your online business, certain elements need to be evaluated and several tactics should be implemented. It’s important to look at what’s working and what’s not working so that you can adapt your strategy to most effectively meet the needs of your audience, and ultimately foster the growth you’re looking for with your business. After your website has launched, consider the following three strategy elements essential to your business plan:

Website_Maintenance
Photo Credit: Kickify

8. Maintenance

  • What CMS (Content Management System) is in place or should be in place?
  • What resources are in house, or do I outsource?

9. Follow up Marketing

  • What customer service is required or should be offered?
  • What can keep them coming back? Remarketing? Newsletters?

10. What Next?

  • Now what are the competitors and target audience up to, how do I keep up?
  • What else can I add to my website and overall marketing to stay relevant?

An Effective Strategy

The right strategy helps any business take their goals and objectives, outlines them, and creates actionable methods to accomplish goals. By looking at a strategy in several phases, and ensuring that the most important elements, as identified above, are included, you will find the online success you’re seeking to be attainable. Reaching your customers in the most effective way will help foster sales, and build out business growth. A strategic approach will be crucial to reaching your objectives.

 

Instagram for Business: 5 Tips for Effective

Posted on by Zafer

Instagram_For_Business_Advertising

Social media advertising is on the rise, and more and more social media platforms are providing advertisers with the capability to advertise on each individual platform to best reach their target audience within a specific channel. Instagram has officially joined the game, and with an expected growth to hit over 100 million users by 2018, it’s an obvious decision for relevant businesses to utilize the new advertising options that have been made available.

instagram_users

So, what kind of businesses should consider advertising on Instagram?Instagram is an incredibly visual-centric social platform, ultimately providing users with appealing imagery that is highly engaging and shareable. With the capabilities to Like, Comment, and Share the content posted by other users, your content’s reach is organically extended to a large portion of the Instagram network.

Businesses with captivating imagery, product photos, and lifestyle-based content (think company events, flowers in the office, happy hour) are able to give their target audience a glimpse inside the brand on the Instagram platform. This “point-of-view” strategy allows users to better understand the background of the business, get to know their employees, how their products are made, and obtain a behind the scenes look at the company – building trust and forging brand loyalty in the process. Fashion companies, lifestyle brands, bloggers, magazines, and other businesses with strong imagery to share tend to be the most successful on the Instagram platform.

Instagram has made an atmosphere for marketers to create a close bond with consumers via mobile devices. With a less conventional content concept in comparison to other traditional advertisements, this form of social engagement can significantly increase digital visibility. The platform offers similar characteristics to Twitter and Facebook, yet the specific steps to connect with your audience are different. Follow these 5 tips to expand your brand reach and effectively advertise on Instagram:

1. Set Your Goals

For any social media advertising initiative, defining your goal should be the first step; followed by the strategy to reach these goals (targeting, content to be shared, brand voice, etc.), which should be built with these objectives top of mind.

Is your brand interested in advertising on Instagram to build out their following? Is the business launching in the US market and seeking to expand brand awareness throughout the country? Is the company launching a new line and seeking to leverage the existing audience of their current, well-established line? Once the goals for your advertising efforts are identified, your business can move towards the execution of the advertising campaign.

2. Establish Your Point of View

With a strong visual presence on the platform, Instagram uses imagery (and the use of some text and hashtags as well) to deliver messaging to users. Businesses must create a brand strategy unique to each social platform, and specifically on Instagram, decide what specific “point of view” they would like to convey to their target audience. Think sneak peek into the showroom, the latest celebrity look from the brand, or a look inside the factory where products are manufactured. Once a brand’s point of view strategy is established, the content strategy should be built to support it.

3. Create A Content Strategy

Instagram_advertising_ideas

Supporting the goals and point of view previously established by your business, your content strategy should go hand in hand with the two. Within the content strategy, you’ll want to tell a story to users on the platform. Keep in mind, users on each social media platform are unique, so the content strategy across social platforms should vary a bit, while aiming to maintain an overall consistent brand voice across all channels. By analyzing the success of each post, you will be able to best determine what works best in terms of content, and optimize your efforts accordingly.

4. Utilize Hashtags

Leverage the organic reach of your posts with the use of relevant and trending hashtags. Instagram’s resources provide inspiration for ways to best use hashtags to connect with the community and extend your brand’s reach.

hashtags_to_watch

5. Continue Improving

In both organic posts and advertising efforts, the success of each should be analyzed and reported on regularly to best determine what works best and what kind of posts don’t perform as well for your specific brand. Maybe the use of a specific hashtag resulted in 30% more engagement on two similar posts, or maybe a specific image type generated noticeably higher results. By analyzing and understanding the success of your efforts, your brand is able to optimize posts accordingly to help foster the best results possible.

Instagram for Business

Instagram is a highly visual social media platform, and it provides brands with the ability to share their point of view with the world. With advertising capabilities being extended to more businesses, we expect to see immense growth on the platform. By following these 5 tips for effective Instagram advertising, your brand’s content strategy and advertising efforts will boost the success of your social media efforts.

 

Domain Migration Tips To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

Posted on by Zafer

SEO_website_redesign

Rebranding is one of the most common marketing initiatives for businesses, and can occur for many reasons. Whether it is an attempt to dissociate with the performance of the past or to simplify the brand, this marketing tactic can be very effective if approached properly.

Some notable brands have undergone this process including Comcast’s rebranding to Xfinity, and the British Overseas Airway Corporation’s (BOAC) rebranding to British Airways. In the digital world, Quantum Computer Services successfully changed its name to America Online in 1991–and even Google rebranded from their original name, BackRub.

While rebrandings can be very profitable, it requires a very complex interplay of resources to be successful. One of those resources is search engines and the way they manage a change in domain. In some cases, the original brand has such a strong online presence that a Google search will still return several pages and results before the actual current page. BOAC returns several Wikipedia pages and YouTube video results before you start seeing the current brand’s site, British Airways. On the other hand, if you do a search for Comcast, you’ll find paid and organic results for Xfinity.com occupying the first two ranking positions and the Wikipedia page for Comcast down at position 5.

SEO Preservation

SEO Preservation can be a broad term that may include a variety of performance indicators including page-rank, traffic, ranking keywords, online purchases, bookings, and many more. When SEO preservation is not a key factor throughout domain migration or the URL restructuring process, there are some key lessons that can be learned. As search engine optimizers, we understand that often other factors like time-resources, budget, other marketing efforts, or even client buy-in to the SEO process may inhibit the preservation process. Brands that have failed at this process chose to focus on other priorities during their website migration process, and unfortunately, as a result they have seen dramatic dips in their site performance.

To highlight this, consider the following example. This company, started with 2,100 keywords ranking in the top 20 search results before the domain change and one month later saw a 40% drop to fewer than 1,400 terms in April.

Domain_Migration_Keyword_Drop
Another “nightmare scenario” for SEO is to have domain migration occur so that both domains remain live for some time and links connect the old and new sites back and forth. To avoid this, coordinate the shift all at once because the existence of two live domains with substantial amounts of duplicate content and partial implementation of redirects will send conflicting signals to search engines about which site should rank. Consequently, the domain authority is then split instead of shifted from the old domain to the new one. In some cases we’ve seen domain authority drops for both the old and the new domain.

To illustrate this, consider this example below. Average daily site visits dropped in half due to falling organic traffic when the site no longer ranked for terms that they dominated only weeks before.

Domain_Migration_Organic_Traffic

Rebrandings with SEO in Mind

What steps do you need to plan ahead for, in order to minimize the chance of these drops impacting your business?

There are 6 critical components to maintaining domain authority, digital presence, and accurate tracking of the domain migration. Some of which impact how the domain is perceived and some are related to how the migration is tracked. Keep in mind these crucial elements if your preparing for a rebranding:

  1. Redirects
  2. Resubmit Sitemap
  3. Directory Listings
  4. Social Media
  5. Analytics and Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) Profiles
  6. Audit Redirects

Redirects

The most obvious first step is to put in place redirects which automatically route a user from the old domain and page to the new one. There are a range of types of redirects that are available, but for these types of redirects, a 301 is best. A 301 status communicates to search engines and web browsers that the page has been permanently relocated and redirects the user to the correct page. A 301 redirect also transfers ranking power (sometimes called “link juice”) that the legacy page had built up to the new page.

In order to identify every page on the site that needs to be redirected, several tools, including Xenu Link Sleuth, Screaming Frog, Integrity for Mac, are available to “crawl” the legacy site. Pay special attention to URLs that have the most in-bound links, or receive the highest volume of inbound traffic from other sites. These pages are home to most of the site’s “link juice” and must be maintained. Tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer, Google Search Console and Majestic SEO, can be used to compare and make sure that nothing gets skipped or overlooked.

Once the list of legacy pages is complete they must be mapped to pages on the new site and redirected. A simple way to help you do this is to create an excel file listing the old URL’s in one column and the new ones in another. It also helps for verification purposes later.

It’s important to be prepared to make all of the changes at once instead of drifting a handful of pages at a time. Leaving both domains live sends conflicting signals to search engines and can damage the domain authority of both the legacy and new domains.

Resubmit Sitemap

Once the redirects have been implemented it’s important to notify Google and Bing Webmaster Tools that a change of address is happening. Leave the old site’s XML sitemap live for about a week after the migration so crawlers can still access it, follow the links therein through the 301 redirects, and start working the old URLs out of their indexes.

Create a XML sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools/Search Console. Typically, it can take a day or two before the new crawl takes effect and you can compare the number of indexed pages.

Directory Listings

Along with inbound links, directory listings are one of top sources used by both search engines and users to find a website or domain. It’s considered best SEO practice to make certain that listings in online and print directories are current and accurate. A domain migration requires returning to all of the directories that list the legacy domain and updating them to reflect the new address. These directories may include (most generically) FourSquare, InfoGroup, Localeze, YP.com, City Search, and DMOZ. An aggregation tool like MozLocal can help bring all of these directories into alignment.

In addition to the generic directories most businesses have an opportunity to be listed in industry-specific directories. From auto-dealers to law firms or home maintenance professionals, you’ll likely find a set of available directories. The longer a legacy domain has been in existence, the more directories that will subsequently need to be updated.

Social Media

There is a strong correlation between social media engagement and web traffic. Announcing and publicizing the domain name change to provide important social signals and promote the rebranding in its own right. This will generate higher than usual volumes of traffic to the new domain in order to compensate for the potential drop in organic traffic while Google is indexing the new domain. While it isn’t critical to update all legacy posts with a new domain, it’s crucial to make sure that any pages that have social media links to them are correctly redirected. Update social media profiles, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google +, but don’t neglect LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger, YouTube and any others that are connected to the website.

Analytics and Search Console Profiles

The profiles in an analytics package, whether it is Google Analytics or a fee-for-service provider, will track the traffic to a specific domain, and if it’s set up correctly should not be tracking activity on other domains. In the Admin tab of Google Analytics, the property name and default URL should be updated to reflect the new domain. This is also the time to annotate Google Analytics in order to track the date of the migration.

Google_Analytics_Property_Settings
In addition to Google Analytics it’s important to update settings in Google Search Console, only AFTER the migration has occurred.

1. On the Search Console homepage, click the name of the legacy site.
2. Click the gear icon; then click change of address.
3. Follow the instructions in the change of site address tool.
4. Monitor site traffic as indicated in move a site with URL changes.

Google_analytics_change_of_address

Audit Redirects

Once everything is complete, it’s important to verify that everything is working as expected. The Screaming Frog web spider tool can help run an audit of the old and new site to examine the results.

1. Upload: The legacy URL’s

Switch the SEO Spider to ‘List Mode,” select the file with all the old URLs to audit and upload.

Screaming_Frog_List_Mode
This is where the log that was saved from step 1, redirects comes back into play.

2. Select: The ‘Always Follow Redirects’ box

Navigate to the ‘Advanced’ tab inside the ‘Spider Configuration’ and select the ‘Always Follow Redirects‘ option.

Screaming_Frog_Advanced_Tab
As default ‘List Mode’ works at a 0 crawl depth, meaning it just crawls the URLs included in the upload. With this feature selected, it ignores depth and will follow redirects until the final destination (a no response, 2XX, 4XX or 5XX etc.).

3. Start the crawl

Now hit the ‘Start’ button let the SEO Spider crawl the site, reach 100%, and come to a stop.

4. Click on ‘Reports’ & ‘Redirect Chains’

Screaming_Frog_Redirect_Chains
This report does not just include URLs which have redirect chains, it includes every URL in the original upload and the response in a single export. If a URL has multiple redirects in a chain, this export will map out each hop along the way, redirect 1, to redirect 2, to redirect 3, and all the responses along the way until the final target. It will also show how many hops there are (remember 5+ Google might give up and treat as a 404) and identify any pesky redirect loops.

This report provides a comprehensive method to audit all redirects in a site migration in a nice, easy, single export.

Effective Domain Migration To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

While there are a lot of steps in this process and many intricate details to pay attention to, with preparation and a clearly outlined plan it can be possible to identify unexpected behavior or disparities before they have a notable impact on traffic and visitors. Following the steps to update analytics packages and audit redirects will help identify opportunities to make changes before they become problems.

Now, go forth and change that domain!