Breaking Down The Big Three In The World of Digital Marketing

What is Website Design and why is it so crucial to your business?

Consider your website the digital face of your business. In these modern times, we don’t always have time to speak to every potential customer or client face to face. Often times that “first impression” or connection happens without us ever even exchanging a word. A well put together website with proper visual aids and product education will conserve a considerable amount of effort and time on the part of the business owner. Wether you are fantastic with people and love face to face sales or not, you may not always be given the opportunity to make that initial link. This is where your website becomes so crucial. A visually stunning and educational resource can provide you with the boost you need to drive any potential clients to make that phone call, purchase product directly from your website, or come visit your onsite location. Without a modern and responsive website, your business could find itself lagging behind on a plethora of potential sales and growth. Don’t let the lack of website be the deciding factor in the success of your business, reach out to a development team to help elevate your sales and push your business to the next level.

Landing page

This is the homepage of your businesses website. The first impression. Completely customizable and can be endlessly. Many businesses chose to play a video, others just wish to have other links to products and services, or possibly an online shop. Solid development teams can create color schemes, transitions, animations, to aid your branding styles and keep the user engaged. Conversely, they can keep things efficient, simple and product focused if that is your goal.

Additional pages

How many other pages does your website need? That all depends. Would you like an online shop for customers to purchase goods or services? Would you like product description pages? A section where you breakdown the history of your business, products and reviews from other clients? Sure, dev teams can create as many additional pages as you need. It’s all based on how much business you feel you will acquire digitally vs. a service which requires onsite interaction.

Online shop

The online shop is one of the most powerful merchandizing tools available to a business owner. If your business is built around the shipping and sales of products, merchandise or apparel — the online shop can greatly increase productivity and efficiency. For example, if your business sells a product that ships worldwide, an online shop can make this process completely automated. From sales to shipping, the shop creates one streamlined process which can even archive customer information to make future sales effortless for the customer. Shops also feature other amazing functions like subscriptions, similar product suggestions, and one click checkout.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), how does it work and why is it so important for your business?

Guide a potential clients online search directly to your page

Search engine optimization can be a confusing topic, so let’s start with the basics. Every time you open up a search engine (think Google, FireFox, and Microsoft Edge among many others) and type in a phrase or a question, the search engine beings to gather data from the internet which meticulously fits the criteria of your search query. If you query “ “Orlando Motorcycle Mechanic”, the engine will begin to take each word, both individually and contextually to produce a search result. So essentially, search engines use very complex algorithms to search about 22 million webpages they have indexed and deliver you the “perfect” result to your search. Terms like “near me” and “cheapest” or “highest reviewed” are also very common terms we use with SEO to drive your website results organically.

The quality and accessibility of your website will impact SEO

Sticking with our original example, I open google and search “Orlando Motorcycle Mechanic”. The top three search results (that aren’t ads) will most likely be websites which respond very well regardless of what device you are on. Meaning, if I am on a phone, tablet or desktop — the website will respond and act the same regardless of the device. If your website performs poorly on one or more of these devices, it will likely fall lower on the search results and not get as many clicks or drive business to your website. Today’s search engines use more than 215 factors to influence your website’s placement in the results. So once again, SEO is a very important factor in getting your website seen.

What does “organic” mean in relation to SEO?

We have thrown around that term a couple times now, so it’s important to note that organic search results are the exact of what’s known as PPC (pay-per-click). Most of the time, when you query something in google, the first couple pages are ads. These are paid for by businesses to be shown above all others. They are not driven by SEO or other organic means. If you’d like to learn more about PPC and how that could potentially benefit your business, keeping reading.

SEO doesn’t care about flashy websites

It’s important to note that SEO doesn’t see websites like we do. The way it is designed, it literally searches through the code that constructs your website for tags, content, site speed, page url’s, image alt tags, internal linking and more. This is probably the most important thing to understand about the differences between having a fancy website and having a responsive and well maintained website in terms of SEO. You can absolutely have both but many times people fail to see the overwhelming value of SEO, so they build out a bloated website and hope this will drive potential customers to their landing page. This is, in most instances, very backwards. Function > beauty.

How did you end up here?

Seriously, how? Odds are, you were googling website services, came across this blog and liked what you saw. So you clicked on this post and began investigating. This led you to our SEO section for a slightly more practical example of how SEO works. Scenario number two is, you googled “how does SEO work” and found us just a couple websites down the first page. While we will not be issuing a technical definition of how SEO works in this post, we do deliver the basics. With how Medium’s SEO is set up, that allows for them to be one of the page one results for our laymen’s explantation of how SEO works. Thus, you have the most practical explanation possible for how search engine optimization works. You are here, and that is most likely not by accident.

What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC), how does it work, and why is it important to understand a utilize this marketing tool?

A powerful method for driving website traffic via non-organic means

Pay-Per-Click currently accounts for over 97% of google’s yearly revenue. That’s right, 97%. One of the foremost reasons being it is simply too powerful to ignore as a marketing tool. Let’s start with the basics, pay-per-click is simple enough to understand in regards to paying google every time someone clicks on one of your ads. It’s safe to say you have most likely run a google search before, but do you remember the first two/three website listings google presented you? Those listings are ads. It even says “ad” in large bold letters just to the left of the website url. Odds are, you either clicked on the ad because it matched your search query perfectly or you kept scrolling because you said to yourself “I don’t want to click on an ad” or “this isn’t what I’m looking for’. Generally speaking, those are the reactions people have when they query a search in google and get a couple ads presented to them before they see the more organic results further down the page. That’s because it largely has to do with the relevance of your keyword choice in your search. Those parameters are not set by google, they are set by the user (you) and google factors them in with your bid price, as well as the quality of the page the keywords are featured on. So not only do you need to set highly relevant keywords and terms and pay more than your competition to get better placement, you also need to have a responsive and well maintained website. All of these factors come in to play when securing placement of your PPC ad over the competition as well as making sure people actually want to click on your ad.

Cost effective pay-per-click vs. spray and pray

If you don’t have unlimited finances to waste on PPC, you may want to carefully consider your keywords and terms you chose to run ads on. A couple very well targeted terms could be the difference between a cost effective marketing strategy or an absolute nightmare. If your terms are poorly chosen, you could be spending top dollar on keywords that aren’t driving website traffic. Conversely, if your website isn’t up to snuff it could be effecting your ad rankings as well. All things considered if you have a quality website and your search terms are properly researched, you could get great bang for your buck out of a marketing campaign.

Pay-per-click or SEO?

Both. If you utilize both of these tools effectively, you could create so much website traffic your server may have trouble handling all of it. Seriously, organic traffic generation is very important — but if someone hits a search and one of those first three ads match their query, it’s a wrap. For a small price, you’ve just secured some solid website traffic and hopefully earned a sale from your online store, a phone call or an email. This helps to not only drive website traffic but also to help your business grow ,which is why we spend money on PPC to begin with. So don’t hesitate, reach out to a development team today and start your first PPC ad campaign.

Keywords & Budget

You should constantly keywords refine these based on your traffic results. You need to also utilize long-tail terms, which are more specific and less searched, but yield a higher ratio of traffic per search. Where as your budget determines how much money can be spent on ads monthly. Once you tap this out, your ad campaign is either halted or you may add funds to continue. This is why relevance of keywords and placement is so important.

Thank you for reading, we hope we shed some light on a few of our favorite digital marketing services and how they could potentially impact your business in a rapidly growing digital marketplace.

• Luke Siefert