A Great Brand Design Is Built on a Solid Foundation?
The visual identity of a business can’t just be what someone thinks looks good. An effective brand must: accurately represent the business; engage positive customer response; and differentiate the business from its competitors.
Branding is so important to the success of the entire enterprise that decades of market research have quantified every detail, from colors, fonts and shapes to the number of words in a slogan (7 max). The results of that research are what we use to craft a brand that does its job, now and for years to come. Here are some of the things we need to know about your business before we begin the design process.
What is your industry?
Whether you’re in the hospitality business or the financial sector will make a big difference in the choice of brand color(s), among other things. Blue is the most popular color for businesses that want to convey stability and integrity; in fact, it’s the most common corporate color overall. Here’s a quick rundown of branding color psychology: the brand values and industry sectors associated with each.
- Blue (secure, trustworthy): Finance, technology, energy, health care
- Green (wealth, health): Health care, energy, agriculture
- Yellow (light, happiness): Energy, hospitality, household
- Orange (fun, vitality): Health care, household, technology
- Red: (dynamic, passionate): Hospitality, automotive, retail
- Purple (royal, creative): Technology, arts/crafts, finance
- Black (sophisticated, upscale): Retail, automotive, technology
- White (clean, pure): Health care, retail
What is your business?
Within an industry, there’s a wide range of products and services being marketed, and customers being marketed to. A surgical equipment manufacturer and a wellness spa are both in the health care sector, but their businesses are very different. Target and Neiman Marcus are in the same business, but their customer bases are different; that’s why Target’s logo is red and Neiman Marcus’s is black.
You may have noticed that in the color list above some sectors appear more than once. That’s because the colors can be further refined to represent your specific business. A regal deep purple gives an impression of authority, whereas a light lavender purple creates a sense of spirituality. What’s more, two colors can be combined to produce the desired effect. McDonald’s combination of red and yellow is one brilliant example.
What is your mission?
Now we delve into the nature of what you do. Is it a trendy or rapidly evolving field? Or will your offerings essentially be the same five or ten years from now? Your answers to these questions will guide the decision on how time-sensitive your brand design should look, and how often you will need to update it.
In most cases, we believe that brand identity should not be built on a passing fad, unless you plan to go out of business as soon as that fad has passed. Even for sellers of the latest must-haves, it’s better to invest in a timeless image than one that will be considered old-fashioned in the not too distant future.
Let’s look at Target and Neiman Marcus again. The Target typeface is bold, clean and modern. Neiman Marcus uses a slim, elegant script font. Each of them is a perfect choice to appeal to the tastes, lifestyles and motivations of their customers, yet both are classic designs that won’t look dated.
Who are your customers?
A brand design must meet the expectations and desires of your target audience. Choosing a whimsical cartoon drawing for your logo is great if you’re advertising to parents of small children; not so much if your prospects are corporate decision makers.
The psychological principle behind this is called cognitive dissonance. When human beings see a discrepancy between their beliefs and their perceptions, doubt is created: about the entity causing the doubt and the wisdom of doing business with that entity. Would you buy a $50,000 diamond ring from a street vendor? No, you expect to see expensive merchandise in a high end store and don’t trust its value when you see it in a different context. One of the important goals of brand development is to prevent cognitive dissonance.
Who are your competitors?
Your brand should clearly differentiate you from others selling the same goods and services. That’s why we take a thorough look at who you’re competing with, to avoid accidental duplications. And we certainly wouldn’t intentionally copy any other business’s brand, no matter how successful; not just because it’s unethical, but because doing so would only lead to customer confusion, not conversions.
What are your marketing arenas?
Your brand design should look good in multiple media, from your business cards to your website to a giant trade show display. It should be easy to read on tiny smartphones and grainy newspaper ads. It should be visible when superimposed on different colored backgrounds that you might want to use in a magazine or TV ad.
These are all reasons why “less is more” is our brand design mantra. For legibility, scalability and recognizability, minimal outperforms cluttered every time. This applies to complexity of the artwork, number of colors, number of lines and number of words per line.
We create versions of the brand design for every medium it will appear in: color and grey scale, low resolution for email ads and high resolution for printed brochures, with and without your slogan, and any special situations that come with marketing your business. Costs of using the design will also be considered: it’s cheaper to print a one- or two-color letterhead than a full-color one.
The more we know, the smarter your design.
At ACS, we ask so many questions in order to deeply understand your brand’s platform and customers. Once we’ve done that, we can apply proven marketing strategies to designing a brand that will empower your marketing campaigns, customer response and ultimate business success.
And if you’re not sure of the answers, we have decades of marketing expertise to help you define your brand. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation.
Restaurant Web Design that Really Sizzles
Restaurants have always relied heavily on word-of-mouth to keep a steady stream of hungry customers. In the digital age, word-of-mouth has suddenly become word-of-Internet, with the almighty Google churning up the most popular restaurants for people seeking a good meal. To gain popularity online, your website’s appearance needs to pique searchers’ interests. Smart restaurant web design is key to winning the search rankings game and convincing browsers try your place.
A lot of restaurants and franchises are required to run their website on a specific limiting CMS platform that only lets you do so much and don’t optimize very well for maximum organic traffic. It is a wise move to fully customize your website to maximize its performance in the market. Restaurants can utilize their websites for online orders, menu updates, weekly specials, and much more. Once you have the site live, work on local SEO to maximize “near me” visibility in which the search crawlers line up your name / address / phone number / URL across the entire web.
Key Ingredients for Restaurant Web Design.
At ACS Creative Services, we’ve had the pleasure of creating powerful Internet brands for many of Baltimore, Charleston and Washington D.C. local eateries. Two of these were even featured on Diners, Drive Ins and Dives—a huge boon for them. We’ve become particularly adept at restaurant website design geared toward the restaurant industry, and helping restaurant owners lure customers with an online presence that whets their appetites.
Below are a few insights into what makes restaurant website design successful.
It cannot be stressed enough that high quality images of your signature dishes go a long way toward promoting your restaurant online. The premise here is simple: If the food looks good, people will want to try it. Take this website we created for Coyote Grille.
The steak is front and center by design—and it looks mighty tasty. It’s flanked by perfectly cooked shrimp and vibrant greens. The headline reinforces the idea that the food here is great. Then the location right below sends you grabbing for your keys and out to dinner. This site doesn’t rely heavily on images. In fact, there are only three—but they are three good ones. If you can’t afford a whole lot of professional food photography, then get one amazing shot of your best dish. A good web designer will know how to maximize that image. That’s essentially what we did for the Coyote Grille.
A hopping, casual diner should have a website with complementary colors and type. Likewise, the most romantic steakhouse in Washington DC requires a website that evokes the same ambiance. Take The Prime Rib’s site. The dramatic use of black and silver perfectly evokes the experience of sharing an exquisite filet mignon and rich cabernet with your loved one. Color is reserved for the food images only in order to highlight the excellent preparation of the dishes. Consumers who visit this site quickly understand the kind of restaurant it is—which is exactly what you want from your restaurant website.
If Guy Fieri and Vice President Biden think your diner is the bomb, then that should be duly noted right on the homepage. We took of advantage of Metro 29’s notoriety by putting pictures of Vice President Biden and Guy Fieri up front and center—along with a series of food images that will make your mouth water. The Guy Fieri callout links to video from the episode—so you can hear all the great things Guy has to say about Metro 29. And because it is such a popular place, we added a news section that features a gallery of famous patrons. Consumers like to go where the famous go. Metro 29’s restaurant’s website lets everyone know it’s got the stamp of approval from some pretty hefty palates. Check it out here.
The owners of The Tortilla Café have been running successful businesses since 1983—as a family. Consumers love personal interest stories. They love to help family businesses. If this is part of your story as well, then your restaurant web design should reflect that. On The Tortilla café website, the tab for Our Story is second, and the blurb includes pictures of the owners. This creates an intimate portrait that brings readers into their lives—and into their restaurants. When you add a very appealing and vibrant design that maximizes the color yellow to hint at the cultural fare, you’ve hit a homerun. Throw in Guy Fieri (The Tortilla Café was also featured on his show) and you’ve got a grand slam.
5. Make your restaurant website easy to navigate.
This is true of all websites, but especially important for restaurants. People searching for a place to eat online want to understand what kind of restaurant your have, what you serve and where you are. These things should be immediately clear. Good restaurant website design is delicious images and great content, but it is also more than that. Great restaurant design should create a culinary journey that starts with your best dish and ends at your best table.
Transform your restaurant website design into a powerful, customer-luring tool. Make a reservation with ACS Creative Services.
Facebook Locations Features Boost SEO
To better help companies increase their social media exposure, Facebook Locations feature is designed specifically for businesses with multiple locations. These companies can link their individual store pages to the corporate Facebook page and, more significantly, feed content to all from the main page. Since in the game of Google rankings online content is king, Facebook’s Locations provides businesses with a savvy tool for efficiently proliferating content. Here are a few of the pros and cons.
With Facebook Locations, each individual store Facebook page takes on the branding of the main corporate page. This means the main image and favicon remain the same across all the company’s pages. Any content posted to the main Facebook page is also fed to the individual store pages. So if corporate posts information about a company wide promotion, every store Facebook page will have the same information appear in its newsfeed. This saves each busy store owner much social media posting time.
Pro: Protect your brand.
Managing your company’s brand and presence across social media is a gargantuan task. Because individual Facebook pages get their branding from the corporate page, pages are consistent across Facebook. No need to worry about rogue logos and other content that violates brand standards. This is critical in a time when even a small social media faux pas can be very costly.
However, Facebook understands that each location needs to promote itself among its local customers. So Facebook likes are exclusive to each individual page. Corporate might have 500 likes, store A might have 50, and store B might have 1000. Facebook likes are not aggregated. Each individual store has the opportunity to cultivate its own likes and post content relevant to its locale. Likewise, a negative comment on one location’s page will not show up on the corporate feed or on any of the other store’s Facebook feeds. This makes Facebook Locations a smart tool for both the corporate entity and individual location owners and managers.
Con: New store pages will have 0 initial likes.
Facebook Locations will link all your company Facebook pages. But if you have to add new ones, those locations will launch Facebook pages with 0 likes—which means the individual store owner will have to start garnering Likes ASAP. This can create extra work at the beginning. However, the long-term benefits of building an individual location’s presence on Facebook while receiving corporate content support far outweigh the initial investment in social media campaigning.
Pro: Facebook will set up Locations for you.
In fact, you can’t set it up yourself. You have to apply for the feature to be added to your Facebook account. And not just any account. To get started, you need a Facebook business account. From the Facebook business account settings, you contact Facebook Support. A friendly customer service rep will either live chat with you or call you back—whichever you prefer. Facebook will then email you links to templates you fill out with all your locations and relevant information. About a week later, your locations will be all set up. You’ll also have a Locations tab under your account settings from which you can easily add and delete locations. Once Locations is set up, you can manage it yourself—though customer support is always available when questions arise.
Dunkin is doing it.
Major corporations are trying out this new Facebook feature to control branding across multiple Facebook presences. Dunkin Donuts relies heavily on Facebook Locations to manage social content for its thousands of locations. Check out the corporate FB page and look for your local franchise. Note how the branding is controlled, but local managers can still infuse neighborhood driven content.
We put Facebook Locations into action, too.
At ACS Creative, we walk the SEO walk, implementing new tools for ourselves before suggesting them to our clients. So we contacted Facebook and asked them to set up Facebook Locations for ACS’s multiple offices in Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina. We can verify that this step was very easy and that the customer service reps at Facebook responded quickly. ACS is now implementing Facebook Locations.
You can visit and like our corporate page here.
Then visit and like and our locations in:
So far so good.
The pros outweigh the cons.
Though we had to create new Facebook pages for our individual locations and start at zero likes, each individual manager can now more effectively target their FB page to local clients while benefitting from a constant stream of content put out from our corporate office. It is too soon for us to gauge effectiveness, but we suspect that Facebook Locations will be a boon to many businesses.
Grow Your Business with Local SEO Landing Pages
[intro]Is your local business visible when people search online for goods or services “near me”? It had better be. According to Google, there are 34X more local searches today than in 2011. Here’s how to create local SEO optimized landing pages that will (A) enable your neighbors to find your business, and (B) convince them to go there.[/intro]
What Are Local Landing Pages?
Local landing pages are geared toward the business’s physical location. This is usually the city and state, but multi-branch operations can also have a separate page for each street address. The Anthropologie chain of retail stores is one example of this practice. Search “Anthropologie Washington DC” and you’ll get a list of its locations within the city. Click on the location of your choice and you’ll be taken to the landing page for that branch.
You will find that your local landing pages will rank fairly quickly depending on how many competing businesses there are in your region and how large your geo location is. It is a really good starting strategy to start driving organic traffic to a new site.
In addition to organic search results such as the Anthropolgie example above, the local landing page can receive click-throughs from your online ads, marketing emails, social media pages and any other inbound links on websites, blogs, etc.
Local SEO Optimization of Your Landing Pages
In order to be displayed in local search results, your landing pages must contain specific elements that Google and other search engines look for. Most of them are a matter of common sense and paying attention to details, yet it’s surprising how many businesses miss a step — and make themselves invisible as a result.
What Should Be on Local Landing Pages?
Here you will tell prospective customers everything they need to know to find and visit your local business. And you will give them some great reasons for doing so. As an added bonus, a quality crafted landing page will be rewarded by the search engines with higher placement in their results.
A successful local SEO optimized landing page brings together SEO and marketing knowhow so that each supports the other and delivers maximum results. That’s exactly what we do at ACS Creative. Call us today and find out how our teams of experts can create a powerful landing page for your business.
Easy, Effective Lead Nurturing with Drip Email
[intro]Sales and marketing pros know that very few prospects are converted into sales at the first contact. The vast majority of those leads need consistent touches over a period of weeks or months before they are convinced to make a purchasing decision. That’s why it’s so important not to give up on them and let huge potentials for new business escape (probably to your competitor).[/intro]
Get the conversation going.
By developing a drip email campaign you establish ongoing relationships with prospective buyers, you build their trust in your brand, products and services. But, as with every other relationship, you have to be there for them — how, when and where they want you to be. That means first providing them with relevant information, and then responding to their communications in a timely manner.
For a small or start-up business, keeping your brand at the top of customers’ minds is relatively doable through the unaided efforts of your salespeople. However, as you scale up, nurturing leads on a one-to-one basis will become impossible. This is where email can save your day … and your sale.
Why email?
You may have read that email marketing is so over. What they were really saying is that broadcast emails (the equivalent of delivering a flyer to every house) are not so effective. However, targeted email is still one of the best ways to reach your audience.
What is drip email?
Also known as automated, lifecycle and autoresponder email, it’s the fastest, easiest way to conduct an email campaign. Once the emails are written and designed, they go into a queue which sends them out automatically on a schedule you set in advance. Drip email allow your sales team to consistently nurture hundreds of leads, instead of maybe a couple of dozen.
Step 1: Develop a schedule.
Decide whether you want to send an email every so many days, at specified stages in the sales funnel, or in response to a trigger.
A calendar-based campaign could contain:
A trigger-based schedule might include:
Step 2: Target the message and design.
When the content is relevant to their needs, people reading your emails are more likely to respond. Segment your lead list according to their interest in specific products and services, and customize your emails further with their name, company, purchase history, which previous emails they’ve opened, etc.
And ALWAYS include a call to action. What’s their next step into the sales funnel: visit your website, email you, call you? Don’t assume they know what to do. Tell them!
Step 3: Make it 2-way.
Nurturing a lead means listening as well as talking. Build a response method into your emails: your phone number, a link to your email address or website landing page, or simply ask them to reply to the email. What they tell you should be incorporated in the next stage of your drip campaign.
Step 4: Connect it to your other marketing channels.
A fantastic way to increase response rates is to leverage your emails on other platforms. In fact, doing so can extend the email’s reach by 77% (Salesforce Marketing Cloud & FaceBook Marketing Science).
Step 5: See how you’re doing.
You’ll never know whether your drip email campaign is meeting its goals unless you track it. Analytics can also be automated to a great extent; you simply plug in the relevant metrics, such as click-through rate, contact requests or conversions. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for identifying behaviors and characteristics of people who click through to your website from the email. If the campaign isn’t performing as expected, consider making adjustments to the content, mailing list or delivery timing.
9 Online Marketing Strategies to Increase Website Traffic and Conversions
Marketing Your Business with Your Website
You expect your sales staff to handle their own process: finding leads, making contact, presenting your USPs and ultimately closing the deal. Your website should be a self-starter, too. If the only way prospects are learning it exists is when you hand them your business card, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
Online Marketing
A good business website should not be just the first step in your sales funnel. It should be able to actively attract people needing services like yours, qualify those leads and assist conversions, all under its own power. In short, it should function like a true sales professional.
1. Update your content
Your website may have been built several years ago. Does it still reflect your current brand image, sales messaging and scope of products/services? Has it kept pace with changing market conditions and what your competition is doing? (Don’t be surprised if this exercise reveals the need for an overall marketing review.)
From a sales point of view, the best thing about the Internet is that it’s demand-driven: people already know they need what you sell, and are looking for it. When your website shows up on page one of their search engine results, a lot more of those potential customers will be heading your way. Online marketing and Search engine optimization (SEO), both on and off site, gets you that coveted top rank placement. This is a multi-faceted endeavor, but a few possible SEO tactics are suggested below.
3. Be mobile responsive
Since 2014, Internet usage on mobile devices has exceeded desktop computers. That’s why it’s now essential to have a responsive website that displays page formats according to the size and shape of the device loading them. This is true even of B-to-B websites, with up to 86% of executives saying they have researched a product or service for their business on their smartphone. If your site doesn’t have this capability, you’re putting a roadblock in the way of prospective customers.
These days Internet users’ attention span is measured in milliseconds. You need them to get your message before they lose patience and leave. There are two ways in which your website needs to be fast: page load and viewer comprehension. The first is for your techie to handle. The second is for your designer, who knows how to create simple, prioritized layouts that focus attention on the key elements. This is even more crucial for B-to-B websites targeting busy executives who won’t waste their time on a site that forces them to dig for the information they need.
5. Get Google Analytics
This website tracking tool can be a salesperson’s best friend. Find out who is visiting, what their needs are, how they found you and much more. Then you can make adjustments to your content, online advertising, etc., to reach your target audience even more effectively.
6. Choose the SEO tactics that are right for you
Certain aspects, such as site architecture and coding that make you visible to search engine crawlers, are essential for everyone. However, there are others which may not deliver a good return on investment, depending on your type of business and customer. For example, websites with embedded videos often get high search engine rankings (assuming the video is tagged correctly); but if that type of content isn’t suited to your products/services, you must weigh the possible SEO advantage against the weakening of your sales message and slowing down of your page load.
An important part of SEO is knowing what keywords people are using to search for what your business provides. When search engines find these keywords in your site content, they will include the site in the results they present to searchers. The trick is to choose words and phrases that accurately represent your business, so that only legitimate prospects see your site. If you’re a nail salon, using a specific phrase such as “nails manicure” would automatically screen out people searching for the kind of nails you hit with a hammer.
8. Make news
By news, we mean anything from a tweet to a major corporate announcement. The point is to post new content regularly on your site and keep visitors coming back to see what’s happening. This helps build trust in your organization. It’s also good SEO strategy, because search engines perceive frequent activity as a sign of quality and value. Bonus tip: You can set up your site so that content additions are automatically posted to your social media pages, and vice versa.
9. Tell them to take the next step
It may seem blatantly obvious that you want potential customers to contact you. And yet, many market research studies have shown that when you actually ask them to do so, response rates are significantly increased. Make sure there are plenty of in-text hyperlinks and “Contact Us Now” buttons on every page of your site, inviting them to initiate the sales process.
With these tips, your website can become a profitable member of your sales team. If doing all 9 seems daunting, then pick the ones that seem most likely to benefit your business. The main thing is to make a start, and let the results guide your next steps.
This is only the beginning of the Internet’s sales and marketing potential. Beyond your corporate website, there’s a world of opportunity in social media, review sites, networking sites, SEM and PPC ads, and more.
Why Your Brand Designer Asks So Many Questions
A Great Brand Design Is Built on a Solid Foundation?
The visual identity of a business can’t just be what someone thinks looks good. An effective brand must: accurately represent the business; engage positive customer response; and differentiate the business from its competitors.
Branding is so important to the success of the entire enterprise that decades of market research have quantified every detail, from colors, fonts and shapes to the number of words in a slogan (7 max). The results of that research are what we use to craft a brand that does its job, now and for years to come. Here are some of the things we need to know about your business before we begin the design process.
What is your industry?
Whether you’re in the hospitality business or the financial sector will make a big difference in the choice of brand color(s), among other things. Blue is the most popular color for businesses that want to convey stability and integrity; in fact, it’s the most common corporate color overall. Here’s a quick rundown of branding color psychology: the brand values and industry sectors associated with each.
What is your business?
Within an industry, there’s a wide range of products and services being marketed, and customers being marketed to. A surgical equipment manufacturer and a wellness spa are both in the health care sector, but their businesses are very different. Target and Neiman Marcus are in the same business, but their customer bases are different; that’s why Target’s logo is red and Neiman Marcus’s is black.
You may have noticed that in the color list above some sectors appear more than once. That’s because the colors can be further refined to represent your specific business. A regal deep purple gives an impression of authority, whereas a light lavender purple creates a sense of spirituality. What’s more, two colors can be combined to produce the desired effect. McDonald’s combination of red and yellow is one brilliant example.
What is your mission?
Now we delve into the nature of what you do. Is it a trendy or rapidly evolving field? Or will your offerings essentially be the same five or ten years from now? Your answers to these questions will guide the decision on how time-sensitive your brand design should look, and how often you will need to update it.
In most cases, we believe that brand identity should not be built on a passing fad, unless you plan to go out of business as soon as that fad has passed. Even for sellers of the latest must-haves, it’s better to invest in a timeless image than one that will be considered old-fashioned in the not too distant future.
Let’s look at Target and Neiman Marcus again. The Target typeface is bold, clean and modern. Neiman Marcus uses a slim, elegant script font. Each of them is a perfect choice to appeal to the tastes, lifestyles and motivations of their customers, yet both are classic designs that won’t look dated.
Who are your customers?
A brand design must meet the expectations and desires of your target audience. Choosing a whimsical cartoon drawing for your logo is great if you’re advertising to parents of small children; not so much if your prospects are corporate decision makers.
The psychological principle behind this is called cognitive dissonance. When human beings see a discrepancy between their beliefs and their perceptions, doubt is created: about the entity causing the doubt and the wisdom of doing business with that entity. Would you buy a $50,000 diamond ring from a street vendor? No, you expect to see expensive merchandise in a high end store and don’t trust its value when you see it in a different context. One of the important goals of brand development is to prevent cognitive dissonance.
Who are your competitors?
Your brand should clearly differentiate you from others selling the same goods and services. That’s why we take a thorough look at who you’re competing with, to avoid accidental duplications. And we certainly wouldn’t intentionally copy any other business’s brand, no matter how successful; not just because it’s unethical, but because doing so would only lead to customer confusion, not conversions.
What are your marketing arenas?
Your brand design should look good in multiple media, from your business cards to your website to a giant trade show display. It should be easy to read on tiny smartphones and grainy newspaper ads. It should be visible when superimposed on different colored backgrounds that you might want to use in a magazine or TV ad.
These are all reasons why “less is more” is our brand design mantra. For legibility, scalability and recognizability, minimal outperforms cluttered every time. This applies to complexity of the artwork, number of colors, number of lines and number of words per line.
We create versions of the brand design for every medium it will appear in: color and grey scale, low resolution for email ads and high resolution for printed brochures, with and without your slogan, and any special situations that come with marketing your business. Costs of using the design will also be considered: it’s cheaper to print a one- or two-color letterhead than a full-color one.
The more we know, the smarter your design.
At ACS, we ask so many questions in order to deeply understand your brand’s platform and customers. Once we’ve done that, we can apply proven marketing strategies to designing a brand that will empower your marketing campaigns, customer response and ultimate business success.
And if you’re not sure of the answers, we have decades of marketing expertise to help you define your brand. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation.
5 SEO Strategies to Improve Rankings
SEO Strategies-What Happens on Your Website Shouldn’t Stay on Your Website
You’ve taken all the right steps to optimize your website for great search engine results. But don’t stop there. How your site interacts with the rest of the Internet can significantly elevate its placement on search results pages. by using the following SEO Strategies you will have taken the first step to moving up the SERPS.
Links
An inbound link (when another website includes a link to yours) is like a letter of recommendation. The more links/recommendations you get, the higher your Google relevancy score. But for heaven’s sake, don’t buy links; this is specifically contrary to the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Obtain links honestly, through requests to relevant websites and a reciprocal outbound link on your own site.
Social Media
Set up your pages so that any new content added to your website is automatically posted on your social media, and vice versa. Linking back to your site from FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. can exponentially increase your site traffic, which will also look great in the Google analytics.
Off-site Content
Get known as an industry leader by contributing to forums, social media groups and website comments pages, answer sites and review sites. Google tracks your author statistics so this activity alone can improve your SEO. Plus, most of these places will allow you to include a link to your own website in your post, thus attracting new visitors.
Review Solicitation
Ignoring your online reputation is no longer an option; Yelp, Google+, TripAdvisor and similar sites have made and broken businesses. In addition to mitigating any negative reviews, you can also encourage customers to post opinions. This will not only generate inbound links, it will also add the review site’s SEO clout to yours.
ACS Creative Review Request Sheet
Search Engine and Directory Submission
Submitting your URLs to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Business.com, DMOZ and other directories may get your website pages indexed faster (but there’s no guarantee). Beware of paid directories, though; they’re mostly worthless.
As we have seen, improving SEO Strategies for your website may begin at home, but it shouldn’t stay there. Incorporate off-site tactics to complete the picture of a successful SEO Strategies.
The Must-Have Essentials for Proper Website SEO
SEO-What Visitors Never See Can Mean Your Site Will Never Be Seen
We’ve discussed how you can develop content to improve SEO (search engine optimization) for your website. But if the site isn’t designed, built and maintained correctly, Google will give it a low ranking and your content efforts will go to waste. Here are 5 things Google needs to see in order to display your site in its search results.
Sitemap.
The sitemap makes every page of your website visible to search engines, even the pages with few or no elements that they could find when crawling the Internet. Create both XML and HTML versions. A clear site structure and sitemap will also improve your chances that Google will show site links for specific pages in addition to your main URL.
Meta data.
Title tags and meta descriptions incorporating keywords will help prove your relevance to search engines. Make sure they’re on every page of your site, and that they’re written to Google specifications: not too short, too long or duplicated on multiple pages.
Coding.
Make it easy for Google to understand your website with current site building technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets. By minimizing the amount of HTML coding on each page, you not only increase text readability, you also improve the text-to-code ratio which Google uses to assess site quality.
Navigation structure.
The more frequently pages are linked within your site, the higher your Google page authority flow. Make those links plain text; search engines can’t recognize image or animation links. It’s also important not to let pages with no chance of getting a high search engine rating (such as the contact page) drag down the site’s overall ranking. Add a special code that tells search engines not to index those pages.
Web host.
You may think you’re getting a good deal by going with the cheapest provider. But if that web server also hosts sites Google doesn’t like, such as pornography, you could get tarred with the same brush and sent to the bottom of the search engine results pages.
These 5 tips barely scratch the surface of back end techniques that can improve SEO for websites. And there’s no getting around it, you really need to be an expert to do it right. If you’d like to learn how our experts at ACS use state-of-the-art SEO technology for building and maintaining websites, please give us a call.
6 Keyword Strategies Used by the Pro’s
Using Proper Keywords In Your Content to Improve Rankings for Your Website
Content is king when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). And for business-to-business websites where most of the content is probably text, getting your keyword right will be the single most important thing you can do for SEO.
Define your keywords.
First, put together a list of the words and phrases people enter in Google’s (or other search engine’s) search field when they’re looking for what you’re selling. These keywords will be sprinkled throughout your website, SEM ads (paid search engine placements) and other marketing media, creating the query relevance that search engines love.
Cover all the bases.
Think of all possible variations on your keywords, such as word plurals and words people commonly misspell. Depending on the goal of your SEO campaign, decide whether to focus on short tail (one or two word) or long tail (three to five word) keywords. Generic, short tail keywords (i.e. “web design“) will deliver a larger, wider response; specific, long tail phrases (“web design Washington D.C.”) a narrower but more relevant response.
Test, analyze, refine.
You can hire a pro to help you determine the most popular keywords, or you can use one of the basic free keyword testing tools on the Internet. For your SEM ads, Google AdWords offers a free tool for coming up with keyword ideas and estimating how they may perform.
Watch your density.
How you incorporate your chosen keywords into the text can either help or hurt your search engine results. Websites that try the old trick of keyword stuffing or packing will find themselves heavily downgraded, if not excluded altogether. Sentences should flow naturally, and there should be no more than three keywords per website page. Add more pages if necessary to fit in all your keywords.
Keyword Density Formula
Hidden keyword placement.
Don’t forget the opportunities offered by website meta descriptions, title tags, URLs and source code. Although meta tags no longer affect Google rankings, they can still improve your click-through rate.
Keep it fresh.
As part of its mission to prioritize websites that offer good user experience, Google looks for sites that regularly update with new content. A good example of this is a blog, which not only gives Google (and customers) what they want, it also expands your keyword opportunities with every new post.
Another ongoing task will be to assess the performance of each keyword on your website, either manually or with automation software, and revise any keywords whose results are dropping.
With keywords chosen, placed and tested correctly, you should see measurable improvement in the SEO of your website.
3 Ways SEO Builds a Business Brand
An Optimized Website Kills 2 Birds with 1 Stone
You expect your SEO efforts to pay off in higher search engine rankings and increased quantity and quality of traffic to your website. But there are additional rewards that, although they don’t appear as statistics in SEO tracking reports, can have an equally important impact on your business.
1. Brand awareness.
How many of your potential customers know you exist? Which is another way of asking how much business you’ll be doing in the future. An SEO website is more visible, thus more likely to be remembered and sought out when prospects are ready to buy. Increased brand awareness may not be reflected in more sales or leads right now, but it will pay off in the long term.
How can you tell if SEO is improving your brand awareness? Honestly, it’s very difficult to measure. But one tracking number you can look at is search impressions (as opposed to click-throughs). That’s the total number of people who saw your website in their search results; they may not have clicked on it, but they have become aware of your existence.
2. Brand opinion.
Getting prospective customers to know your name is only half the battle: you also want them to have a favorable opinion of you. SEO tactics can help with this aspect of your branding strategy as well.
Your off-site SEO campaigns will play the major role in establishing your reputation as a good company to do business with: knowledgeable, caring and reliable. Posts on industry forums, social media pages, etc., not only fulfill their original purpose of driving traffic to your site, they also help sell that traffic before you even make contact.
3. Website opinion.
It’s well documented that a business is judged by its website. If that website is slow, hard to read and hard to navigate, visitors are likely to assume that the business is also unprofessional, outdated, difficult to work with. So, while you’re SEOing your site functionality, you’ll also be improving users’ opinion of your entire brand.
Google paradigms for good user experience include fast and complete page loads, simple navigation and intuitive layouts. Content should not be duplicated on multiple pages. Page titles and meta descriptions should be optimized to give users an accurate overview before they click through.
These 3 “side-effects” of search engine optimization won’t show up as numbers in your Google Analytics report. But when you’re asking yourself, “How can I cost-effectively build my business brand,” an SEO campaign is an excellent answer.