The Importance of Website Design & Digital Marketing
Many local businesses currently have websites, but how often are they updated or maintained to keep up with the ever changing times of internet marketing and search engine optimization? Updating and maintaining a website can make or break an online business and in the long run not allow the company to meet business goals.
More than Website Design
Website design is more than just making it look good. There are many other factors in what makes responsive websites look and work well. Some major factors are load times, SEO implementation, mobile usability, and digital marketing or internet marketing.
Mobile Friendly Website Design
Many businesses do not realize that many of their users first find their websites on a smart phone or tablet. If your site is not mobile friendly the first thing that visitor does is leave your site and look for the next website that is optimized for mobile usage. When our full service marketing agency starts creating a new website our web designers take into consideration how the desktop version will affect the mobile web design. This means that every step of the way they are almost creating two different web designs, one for desktop and one for mobile. They also have to make sure the layout isn't drastically different if a user goes from a mobile site to a desktop site. Keeping everything from mobile and desktop sites comparative and similar.
Website Design Optimization
Having a nice looking up-to-date website is key for customer bounce rates and engagement. I'm sure that many of you have experienced a webpage that felt like it took ages to load and interact with. Websites that have these issues are going to loose more customers because of this. In todays times people want information as fast as possible and if your site doesn't load in under a few seconds they are going to jump to the next site that will load faster. Even if the information on your site is more relevant than the next they are going to leave.
If you are considering hiring a web design company for your website design you need to make sure they understand the importance of a fast loading and optimized webpage. BC Marketing Agency has the tools and proper tests to make sure your site loads fast and can be interacted with quick. Even if you do not want to recreate your entire current site we can optimized content and load times by implementing new code and cutting back on certain problem areas that are causing these issues. We also preform website redesign so that we can maintain all current useful information and make the site more user friendly and increase search optimization.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Keywords
Are you still scratching your head wondering how your competitors rank above you on google searches or other search engines? One of the main reasons they are able to achieve these results is because of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO in very basic terms is what google and other search engines use to "read" your website and rank it based on what a user searches for. There are many considerations to take when trying to improve your SEO or write new articles for SEO campaigns. Such considerations are what keywords are you wanting to improve, setting expectations for what rank you are trying to achieve, and other important backend metrics that effect rankings.
What are Keywords
In lemans terms, keywords are what a user searches on a search engine (Search Engine Marketing). For example if a search is made for "St Louis Web Design" the keyword is the entire search quarry. In this example you would want to make sure you have content related to that search so you can show in the search results. For example you can write an article for St Louis Web Design services that you offer. Notice that using the same wording and format as the search quarry is what is most important when using keywords.
Using the Best Preforming Keywords
Not all Keywords are searched equally, meaning a term such as digital marketing will get more searches per month compared to St Louis digital marketing (this is based on research from Ahrefs and SEMrush). When researching new keywords to improve or rank for you need to consider the amount of new traffic it will bring.
What Keywords to Rank For
Of course you would want to rank for the search topic with the most monthly searches, but so does everyone else. This is where Keyword Difficulty comes into play. This is a ranking from 3rd party research sites that show how difficult it is to rank for keywords. Finding a keyword that has a lower than average difficulty but also a meaningful amount of monthly searches is what you are going to want. Of course this formula will change from business to business based on their current backend metrics and domain rating. (Read Domain Rating Here)
Implementing New Keywords
When trying to implement new keywords to rank for, it is not going to be an instant change. In most studies BC Marketing has done, after creating a new article or editing a current one to boost rankings it takes roughly a week to show anticipated results.
Understanding Site Health
If you have ever used a site such as SEMrush you may be wondering what site health is or how it effects your website. Site Health is a metric that takes in consideration every link and page on your site. This includes broken pages, non-functioning pages, and other page error types. Site health is a metric that should be worked on from the start of creating a website. This makes it easier to maintain and not get overloaded with errors.
Site Health Explained
Site health is more of a website designers task, they will fix broken links or redirect old outdated pages to new ones that are currently hosted. This can be very important if you run an ecommerce site that adds or deletes products on a regular basis. Marketing firms may also be able to take care of tasks like this depending on their knowledge or services.
Understanding Backlinks
Backlinks are a main task of a marketing agency or marketing development services. This is when a site that has a different domain address than your own, links to your website. However, not every backlink is created equal. Backlinks have a huge impact on your domain rating or authority score.
Types of Backlinks
The two main types of backlinks are Follow and No-Follow links. Follow links are more valuable because the website that links you is crediting your site with valuable information and wants to give you credit for your work. Whereas No-Follow links are meant to be used on sites like Facebook. When linking your own website on a site like Facebook for a business page, they make it a No-Follow link. This is because Facebook doesn't want to credit your website and just wants you to be able to have a link on their site for people to click. You can think of No-Follow links as not as valuable and Follow links as valuable links.
Backlink Ratings
Backlinks also come with their own ratings. If you have a backlink from a very well known site like Forbes, the rating will be high and the toxicity level will be low. If you have a backlink from a site that no one knows about and is very spammy this can hurt your own site. The main thing to take into consideration is the level of toxicity the domain has. The higher the level the more you probably want to say away from.
How to Create Backlinks
Creating a large amount of backlinks comes with time and effort. That is why many marketing firms will help create this portfolio for you. A lot of times the use of guest posts for creating backlinks is one of the best ways to start. When writing a guest post for another site, that site will link back to your site as a sort of thank you for creating them content. BC Marketing refers to this as the Guest Post Content Marketing Strategy.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing incorporates all of these metrics and categories to be able to drive more traffic and increase engagement. This can be a lot for small businesses or even a larger business to handle in house. That is why a digital marketing agency might be the right solution for you. Here at BC Digital Marketing Agency we strive to give our clients the best solutions to their needs. We want our clients to understand the metrics we work with and even teach them why it is important to implement these tactics.
From social media marketing to internet marketing to web development services maintaining and implementing these solutions is challenging. It is always best to research digital marketing firms near you and even interview a few of them to find out which will meet your needs and work best to get your marketing solutions up to date and improved. A Marketing company can even go above and beyond the average solutions and implement new programs like marketing automation, graphic design services, branding services, website development, digital advertising, SEO services, SEM services, SEO campaign, market research, email marketing, google adwords, paid search campaigns, logo design services, lead generation, and so many more services.
Many people find companies that only offer certain services and not all of them. This is very normal as there are so many tasks behind each service and they want the customer to get the best experience they pay for. Small business owners may find it harder to narrow down which service they may want. I also recommend social media and organic traffic campaigns to increase site traffic. When you can start branching out for more services finding agencies like a creative agency, design firm, advertising agency, marketing firm, and branding agencies will help greatly.