Why Blog As Part of Your Marketing Plan

Why Blog As Part of Your Marketing Plan?

While many business owners understand how important a website is to their business, far fewer understand the value of a well maintained blog to their digital marketing success.

Phoenix, AZ

It was shown in studies by the Pew Research Center that as of November 2012, 78% of American adults owned a desktop or laptop computer, by October of 2014, 64% owned a smartphone, and as of January 2014 only 14% of American adults do not use the internet. With the internet having become such a popular option for social activities, information gathering, and shopping, many businesses large and small have created websites to promote their products and services, and even sell their products directly online. In fact, a Washington D.C. based research firm called Clutch performed a survey that showed that 74% of businesses have websites, and another 9% planned to build websites to promote themselves. When business owners without websites were questioned, some responded that their businesses are already maxed out in production or that they were already too busy with the work their businesses already have.

So it’s generally accepted that if you want to grow your business, you need to have a website. But one of the top mistakes that many businesses make is creating a simple template website, posting a few pages of information on it, and never touching it again. Why is this a problem? Static websites that never change rarely rank well on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, and won’t drive traffic to your business. An important aspect of making your website successful is continuing to add new information to your site to continue to bring in new customers and clients, as well as encourage old clients to return. So how do you continually add content to your website? The best way is by blogging. Adding a blog to your website where you frequently add new posts with new and interesting information not only adds that unique content that search engines like so much for their ratings, but they are also a way to interest customers in your services or products, and prove to them before they ever speak to you that you are an expert in your field.

A frequent complaint from small business owners is that they don’t have enough to say to warrant a weekly or bi-weekly blog post about their company. However as noted by serial entrepreneur Francine Hardaway in an article about blogging, if you or someone in your company doesn’t have any information to share, “you’re probably in the wrong business.” Your blog content can be anything that is of relevance to your business or clients. If you are designing a new product, update your current and future customers about improvements or setbacks on your design process, create hype and take pictures along the way, showing glimpses of what the finished product will be. If you are already selling a product, show what uses it can be put to, how clothing can be accessorized, how doodads can be used in different crafts, and the different ways an innovative hand tool or software program can be used. Talk about events you have gone to and the great people you have met, if you’ve learned anything new about your own craft or how learning about someone else’s craft has helped you with your own. If you provide a service to clients, talk about different specific and general ways you can assist them. Let people know when you’ve made a major sale or give “in progress” updates about a big job you’re working on. Offer discounts for mentioning your blog or announce special events going on in your store. Make videos about how to use your products or how effective they can be and post them. Talk about major difficulties people can run into if they don’t use someone in your profession. Discuss studies that have been done in your field and your opinion on controversial topics. There is an unlimited number of topics you can write about in your blog about your business.

Another common complaint about blogging is the time it takes to blog, which is completely true. Blogging takes a small amount of time and you need to commit to doing it regularly to get the most benefit out of it. However, most entrepreneurs spend a large amount of time staying on top of their field already. Learning about new technologies relevant their their field, finding out what competitors are offering, testing out tools or equipment for cost-effectiveness or longevity, creating new products or branching out into new fields of service. If you spend several hours, or more, doing research for your company, then spending another 30 minutes discussing what you’ve learned, conclusions you have come to, and any changes you may or may not be making due to these conclusions, makes for an excellent blog post and shows customers that you’re being proactive in ensuring they get the best service from you. If you attend a professional event or spend several days working on a project, taking a few pictures while you’re there and spending a few minutes discussing what’s going on in those pictures can make an interesting blog post with very little time investment. If you spend hours every week showing customers or potential customers the best ways to use some of your products, taking an hour to make a video showing the same thing and then writing a step-by-step how-to guide to go with it can actually save you time by encouraging people to go watch it online rather than make you explain and reenact it time and again. Likewise, if your customers have questions that you answer time and again, making posts with answers to each of these frequently asked questions can be quick to jot down, and may reduce the number of times you have to repeat yourself every week. Even better, if a potential customer tries to Google one of those questions, your blog is likely to show up in the search results, bringing new leads and more traffic to your website.

So is a blog worth it? Absolutely. As shown in Neil Patel’s Infographic, companies that have blogs have 97% more links that those without and many more indexed pages, which improves search engine results, more than 60% of American consumers have made a purchase after reading a related blog post, more than 80% enjoy reading content from company blogs, and 41% want to be notified by email every time their favorite blogs add a new post. That means your clients want to read about your company, your products, and want to return to your site again and again to read more. And when it’s time for them to make another purchase? Your company is the one making the profit.

Written By:
Jenna Towe – My Favorite Web Designs

Phone: 480-335-1330
Email: Josh@store.myfavoritewebdesigns.com
Website: https://store.myfavoritewebdesigns.com

8 Most Common Mistakes Companies Make When Doing Their Own SEO

As a professional website design and search engine optimization company, we often work with clients to do SEO. A Mesa Arizona SEO company has many components with which it must work, and a key part of the program is content creation. While we do have 2 awesome writers and a crew that is second to none when it comes to creating content for websites, we are still limited by the available data on the topic we are writing about. For this reason, we often work with clients in creating content, and with some clients we even share optimization tasks. Here are the things I most commonly see clients doing that can harm or even fatally kill an SEO campaign:

1. Thin Content – Let’s face it, writing about some topics can be tough. After 20 or so roofing blogs, you may not have much left to say about roofs. This causes some entrepreneurs to attempt shorter blogs. While technically a page can have as little as 300 words, we recommend shooting for 500 words or more on all pages on the site. This even applies to pages that are not main pages. We had a client who learned about landing pages, and in his excitement he created 50 blank pages with city / service names, and then left them there for a few weeks. Of course, analytics went down. Why? Thin content on those pages sent a negative signal to Google that the site as a whole may not be a top quality site¹ – quality sites limit their thin content, as it increases bounce rate. ²
2. Duplicate Content – Duplicate content is so not understood. The majority of SEO companies do not get it, even Google seems somewhat at odds with their own philosophy from time to time. ³

   For Duplicate Content to be an issue, there are a few things to differentiate:
   – Is the content taken from another site? That is plagiarism, and open to penalty sitewide, particularly if content is copied with no attribution.
   – Is the content taken from another page on the same site? In this case, subtract the duplicate content from the new page – without the duplicated content, does it still have 500 unique words? a unique image or video? In these instances the duplicated content does not hurt much, it just does not help. Moreover, more unique = better for Google ranking, so on most pages any duplicated content you eliminate helps, aside from duplicate content that is expected and needed – specifically, navigation or user interface elements should be duplicated and consistent.
   – Is there more duplicate content or unique on the page?
   – Lastly, even if the content is not duplicated, has the same idea already been talked about on your website? In this instance, one of the pieces of content should rank and not the other, even if the verbiage is totally unique. The Hummingbird algorithm dealt with Google’s handling of concepts as opposed to words and phrases, very interesting. ⁴ You can see more on some of the penalties out there here on this SEO penalty cheat sheet.

3. Keyword Stuffing – As anyone familiar with SEO knows, stuffing keywords can get you in trouble with the algorithm. Typically, a stuffed page will get penalized in isolation, but many stuffed pages can get the site as a whole a quality hit.

   I’ll also say keyword stuffing is very 2005. If you understand the concept of long tail keywords, and you have related terms prepared for use, as described in latent semantical indexing, then you would not need or want to repeat the same phrase over and over. Moreover, if Google is now interpreting concepts as opposed to individual words, then concept stuff is the new version of keyword stuff. Like this article which manages to link to like every authoritative article about SEO ever written to this article. ^{5 6}

4. Inconsistent Publishing – Another sign of a quality site is producing content consistently over time. Dropping 30 landing pages or 30 blogs at one time, then nothing for a year, is a bad strategy. You need to keep your readership highly engaged, which means supplying new and interesting information on a consistent and timely basis. This also ties back to your social media – if you do not publish, you do not update social, bad signal for search engines, and it looks bad to clients when they see companies have not engaged on social for a long period of time.⁷
5. Many companies fall into the trap of buying links. Purchased links are a mixed bag of nuts. Here at My Favorite Web Designs, we have never purchased links, but we do compete with site that do. You can see this pretty obviously – when you check your competitor link profile, they have spammy or low quality content on non branded third party sites with direct exact match anchor links back to their money pages. This is not natural. Now the problem is that Google does not always penalize or catch this behavior. So you will have one guy telling all his friends how he purchased links through the Ukrainian Link buying network, and now he is #1 and making all this money. Unfortunately, Google eliminates this type of spam in blocks. So, there may be no penalty for a long time, and then anyone who ever did business with that link selling network suddenly gets nuked off the Google planet. ^{8 9 10}
6. Another common pitfall for the DIY SEO warrior lies in site speed and hosting selection. Most of the hosting options you see when looking for hosting are for shared hosting. Shared hosting, which I have discussed extensively in my hosting page, is a mixed bag of nuts. On the upside, you can get your site hosted on a server for as little as $25 a year, which is awesome. On the downside, good hosting can be obtained for about $200 a year, and for the $175 you save by going with cheaper hosting you are then subject to shortcomings of every site on your shared server. If one site is hacked, and consuming resources wildly, this will affect the resources left over to serve your site. This becomes most important when considering googlebot crawl. If Googlebot comes to your server, and the server takes 20 seconds to respond due to overload, that is a terrible user experience for the visitors to the site, and Google will look bad if it sends people to a site that does not load. With shared hosting, your site might be good enough 90% of the time, but when you are working on marketing for the web, having your site unuseable 10% of the time is totally unacceptable. ^{11 12}
7. Too much link building. What?? What is too much link building? Ok, so technically you can have as many links as possible, and the more the merrier, but there are caveats and details to this policy. First, where is the link coming from? A lot of links from low quality sites can hurt your rep, and in some cases need to be disavowed. ^{13 14} A large number of links from sites that are not topically related or geographically related can also hurt. Too many exact anchor match links can be bad. And gaining links too quickly is also definitely a bad thing, also known as unnatural link velocity. ¹⁵
8. Lack of Unique Rich Media or stolen rich media. I cannot tell you how many times I have spoken with business owners who have been taking images from Google images to use in their work, with no thought of licensing or copyright. This fall under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and is illegal, and can cause a lawsuit against the violator. But that is not really relevant from an SEO perspective – from an SEO perspective, if you get busted violating DMCA, your site will be penalized, and many rights holders are pushing search engines to get even tougher in enforcing this. It is important and beneficial to have your own unique rich media to accompany your written words. With proper attribution or rights you can certainly make your article better by adding content from third parties on youtube and wiki commons, and you should, but do not rely on copied media for your rich media component, have unique rich media mixed in there as well. ¹⁶

Some Of Our Best New SEO Techniques From 2015

This is been a very interesting year for search engine optimization companies in Arizona. Many different changes in the way that Google’s algorithm ranks websites have continued to force the technology of optimizing for that algorithm to evolve. Google has continued to focus on structured data including microdata and JSON. These technologies allow web authors to mark up their content thereby clearly indicating which elements are connected to which other elements.

A good example of this is the markup that goes into images and logos, as well as mentions of company or brand name. There is specific schema markup that is recommended for use when these elements occur so that Google knows you are referencing the company being discussed, and does not confuse the brand name with merely a collection of words and sentence or the logo as simply another image on the page.

Other advancements have included optimizing websites for better user experience and mobile experience. Many of us in the Seo community knew that eventually Google would begin to reward well-designed websites, and 2015 marks the year that this has begun. Examples of how this works can be found in the mobile algorithm that was commonly referred to as mobilegeddon. Mobilegeddon was largely marketing on the part of Google, the intention behind it was to for site owners to upgrade their web presence and make it mobile friendly. And in that it was hugely successful. However the name was incredibly overblown as the algorithmic shift was in no way similar to an Armageddon, it simply penalize the sites which had not been designed for mobile or using flash. On the flipside almost any site that was serious about trying to rank prior to this algorithm, had already been optimized for mobile due to the dozens of indications over the past two years that Google is given that this is coming, and because mobile browsing accounts for most 50% of traffic, and not optimizing for that audience would be professional negligence.

With the rise of structured data has emerged the prevalence of websites that are designed to aggregate data for use in Google’s knowledge base. The knowledge base is probably the most relevant advancement in SEO technology in the past two years. One of the main reasons that structured data is now emphasized is so that elements in any website across the web can be correlated directly to items inside of Google’s knowledge base. This data is definitely reinforced by studies done by other SEO entities, such as the 2015 ranking factors study by MOZ or the SEO periodic table distributed by Search Engine Land.

Other things that we have seen devalued include many of the easier or more comment link building strategies, such as social bookmarking or exact match anchor text links. Last year exact match anchor text was penalized in the over optimization penalty, and a common solution was to do branded links with varied achor text. This year we find that context is more important than anchor text itself. For instance does my link to my Queen Creek SEO page exist in the page that does not mention Queen Creek anywhere else? Is it on a page that talks more about web design than it does about search engine optimization? Is the site that it appears on relevant to these topics? And as you can imagine for that reason niche directories have gained prevalence while general directories such as IYP sites have continued to take a hit.

There is more evidence that accompanies activities elsewhere on the web are influencing rankings on the main website. For instance we find that companies that have more reviews rank more easily than companies that never bothered getting reviews. Before in terms of search engine optimization for small businesses, reviews were important in promoting conversion. But now we find that reviews are part of a larger landscape that is taken in context when defining the authority of any given company.

If I had to giv a few recommendations to newer SEO’s or people that were trying to do it themselves without getting too technical, my advice would be this: focus on rich media such as audio and video. Work on custom graphics that are very unique. Make sure that your writing is taking into account the synonyms and vernacular surrounding your main keyword. Do more reverse engineering to find niche directories that are relevant to your specific industry and concentrate on creating good unique content for those properties rather than blasting a multitude of more generalized properties. Make sure your site is mobile friendly and loads fast.

Things we are looking at for the future include the SSL algorithm becoming more forceful and important, more adoption of schema, and more focus on social activity and review activity across the web. We are also paying attention to mobile app development as a ranking factor and of course content length and depth as a factor.