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How to Utilize Customer Reviews to Improve Your Site Design

Author: Eleanor Hecks Website Facebook Instagram LinkedIn

You have just a few short seconds to capture the interest of site visitors. Every element on your page must work together to engage and entice them to hang around. The look of your design as well as the content on your page has a significant impact.

Internet Live Stats estimates there are 1.85 billion websites. The number changes constantly and not all are active at the same time, but no matter how you look at the numbers, you have a lot of things competing for consumer attention.

One thing that is customized to your business is reviews from happy customers. You can implement feedback into your site design to grab attention and drive users to the next step in the buyer’s journey. Let’s look at some of the ways to best utilize reviews and a couple of examples of brands doing it right.

1. Add Testimonials

When you receive a really great review, you may want to get in touch with your customer and ask to add it to your website under testimonials. People who land on your page have no reason to trust you. They are much more likely to listen to what their peers think.

You could also contact those leaving great reviews and ask if they’ll write a testimonial for you. You could use a video testimonial or a written one.

Stio utilizes people who already love their products as brand ambassadors. They’ll share quotes from each person about why they love the products, images of them using various equipment and the ambassadors tell others about the company.

2. Answer Questions

You can also use reviews to answer common questions customers have. Analyze calls and live chat topics. What are the top questions your audience has before making a purchase? Can you answer any of those questions by highlighting certain reviews.

One example might be a clothing site where people often ask if things run true to size. You can answer this question through reviews where the customer states how the item fits.

3. Share Your Rating

If you have a number of reviews under your belt, you can show a pattern of great customer service and consistency with your overall rating. If you have 4.5 out of 5 stars, share that information with people who land on your page.

Use visuals, such as colored-in stars to highlight your achievement. You could also add a link so people can read some of the reviews.

Dataforma shares that they have an average 4.5 out of 5 stars via more than 100 reviews on two different websites. This shows a clear pattern of excellence. New leads can see they deliver on what they promise and have many happy clients. Just under the average rating, they share some awards they’ve won.

4. Engage with Customers

Feedback is your opportunity to engage with customers. If someone leaves you a great review on Facebook, thank them and let them know you appreciate their patronage. When you get a negative review, take the time to reach out and try to fix the problem. This also shows others that you take the customer experience seriously and want to make things right.

Think of reviews as a chance to have a conversation with your customer base. Some interactions might start negative, but the goal is to create a positive outcome.

5. Ask for Reviews

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers for reviews. Email them after a purchase and ask if they’ll leave an honest review. You can even offer a discount on their next order when they leave one.

Add a button on your site making it easy for clients to add their thoughts. Don’t create too many steps. Let them share their rating, a few words and their name. You do want to make sure they are actually customers as some unscrupulous competitors may leave negative reviews just to make you look bad.

If you want to learn how to seek reviews, take a course on Udemy and you’ll learn a lot. Throughout the course, the instructor asks for reviews. When you log into the platform, you’ll see an invitation to leave a rating on each course. Many instructors also send out a message halfway through and at the end of a class asking if you’ll review them.

6. Highlight in the Header

Use a hero shot of a product and then highlight a review in the header. You can swap out the feedback to match items you’d like to promote. If you get a new item in, wait for a few of the first reviews or ask your ambassadors to rate ahead of time.

7. Place on Product Pages

Another way to use reviews is by placing them directly on product pages. This gives potential customers an idea of what others think of the item. If they need more details, they can click to expand the ratings and read the actual reviews.

The Horse places a star rating on each product page along with the number of reviews. Click on the stars or scroll to the bottom of the page to expand the selection and read what others think of the item.

Use as a Trust Factor

The best reviews help build name recognition and trust in your brand. Take the time to read through feedback from your customers. Highlight the words that make you want to buy the item. Think through the questions users likely have and answer them by sharing detailed reviews. You can encourage buyers to take the next step by providing as much information as possible.

Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.

5 Biggest SEO Blunders You Should Avoid

Author: Shane Brown

Introduction

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, as we commonly refer to, is one of the most effective tools that is a necessity for online marketing. In the digital marketing sector, it is one of the highest demanded strategies. It is one of the best ways that you can try to elevate your marketing goals and eventually generate more revenue. 

However, in order to make the best out of it, you must have a fair knowledge and learn about the techniques related to SEO. If you aren’t well acquainted with such hacks, it might lead you to create a lot of mistakes. This is ultimately going to affect your marketing goals. Hence, here we will discuss some of the biggest blunders that people usually commit but which should be avoided. 

What Is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is basically a strategy in the field of internet marketing that is used to gain more traffic to a website or webpage by ameliorating the quality of the website through optimized content. 

If your content is well-optimized, it is bound to rank higher on the search engines. The rankings on a search engine will, however, depend on the number of searches made for a particular keyword by users. You can also take the help of blogger outreach services for more visibility. 

What Is The Importance Of SEO?

To understand the importance of SEO, you must go through the study of the various elements involved in it and how they operate. SEO is an inbound marketing strategy that increases the visibility and prominence of a website. 

It also enhances the user experience by making it easier to navigate. For a business website, SEO tactics can help to draw in better traffic and create more opportunities to gain prospective customers in the long run. This will eventually lead the organization to make higher profits. 

What Are The Blunders You Should Avoid From Committing?

While everything remained low since the pandemic, the digital marketing sector witnessed a boom. Consequently, people started realizing its importance. With such an expanding market, the demands and opportunities for SEO are also growing. 

However, due to changes in consumer behavior and search engine developments, the techniques of SEO are constantly evolving. Thus, it is not an easy task, and mistakes could lead to serious consequences. Here, I have compiled some of the biggest SEO blunders that you must avoid committing:

  1. Publishing Wrong Type Of Content

While considering SEO services, publishing the wrong type of content for your users could be the biggest blunder you commit. You must consider your audience’s preferences before submitting content on your site. 

If you think about copying quality content from some other higher ranked website, it will be considered plagiarized and will only lead to the degradation of your own site. 

  1. Not Using Meta Description, Title Tags, And Enough Headings

Another big blunder that you must be careful about and avoid is skipping on the meta descriptions and title tags. Your focus keyword is not the only thing that matters. Search engines tend to consider such optimizing aspects very severely. 

When these are not included in your content, it might lead to serious consequences for your website. Using frequent and distinctive headings makes it easier for users to understand the topic better.  

  1. Not Using Varying Keyword Phrasings

Using enough keywords for your content is extremely important. However, sometimes there are several users who tend to search for a lesser common phrasing.  Thus, when you are indulging a lot of keywords per page, you can consider making a few variations to the texts wherever possible. 

This will allow both kinds of users, the ones who search for normal keywords and the others who search for a similar keyword with different phrasing, to avail your content.  

  1. Missing Quality Links

Link building services are one of the essential factors of SEO. If you are injecting a higher quantity of external links rather than focusing on their quality, you are just committing a big blunder. 

Hence, you must look into adding links from websites that are well-reputed and boasts a higher rank on the search engine. 

  1. Not Using Analytics 

Generating traffic is not the only aspect that you should focus on in SEO. What is more important is tracking the progress of your efforts. If you do not utilize your analytics package, it is just another blunder that you are making. 

Your optimization results will majorly depend on setup and regular review of the analytics. Tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics can majorly track the performance of any website. 

Final Thoughts

SEO is a very important element that you must focus on if you want to be a successful digital marketer. It is something that must not be taken lightly. Therefore, you cannot afford to commit any blunders when working with such a tool. 

I hope I was able to make you aware of all the mistakes that people usually make but which should definitely be avoided. 

Author Bio,

Shane Brown is a passionate blogger and chief blogging officer at BloggerOutreach  Viacon  seogrowthengine, RedhatMedia,  iDreamAgency  Sbnewsroom ,smartbusinessdaily ,Okeymagazine, Gossipment .He is the man behind Search Engine Magazine, a well-known SEO Magazine. Shane specializes in inbound marketing and creative sales copy.

How to Increase the Domain Authority of Your Website

Author: Arslan Haider

If you wish to rank higher in Google and get more natural traffic to your site, you must have heard or have read something that is increasing your website’s domain authority can boost your rank in Google. However, the truth is not the opposite of it. Because improving the domain authority of your website is not something terrible or a. act of loss.

The higher your domain authority is, the almost certain you are to procure a higher web positioning and get more and better web traffic. Your domain authority is likewise a decent method to gauge your SEO endeavors, just as it contrasts the strength of your site with your opposition’s areas.

Your primary focus should not be on increasing your core, but on the process that improves it. If you keep an eye on the score and will not work for it, then this turns out to be terrible, but if you pay attention to the method of raising your score or your rank in Google, then things are going to be completely unique. You will see your website making progress, and this is something a businessman always wishes to have.

What is Domain authority?

Domain Authority is a number or a numerical value that demonstrates the authority of your site. The higher your area authority is, the more prominent are your odds of positioning higher in internet searcher result pages and getting more natural traffic.

The domain authority is a score between 0 and 100, which attempts to anticipate how well a site will rank on web crawlers. It isn’t equivalent to the positioning score utilized by Google, which can impact your rankings.

An authority which was emerged from PageRank introduced the idea of page ranking, and it was presented by Larry Page back then. And it is still being utilized to determine the measurement of your website rank in Google.

The most important thing about getting traffic on your website is to increase the interest of people in your webpage, and this is not possible by just offering promo codes to people. There are some other ways by which you can increase the domain authority of your website, and they include.

Choose the Name of Your Page

If you are starting your website page, then pick up a name for it. It should be moderately simple, so when people visit it, they can remember it. If they remember, they won’t have any issues getting back to your site since they experience no problem recalling it.

Generate Creative Content

The most important thing that makes a website worth clicking is its natural links. For natural links, you have to generate content that is not only natural but is also relatable, so when people search for something, they can relate to your content. So, you have to write something unique, original, and is worth clicking. Or, in other words, it should be link-worthy.

The content you make should be simple, insightful, useful, and easy to read because, in this, the admins of other websites will reference it in their articles. Practically speaking, this cycle of natural links works, and it is precious.

However, it is time taking, and it demands patience from your side. It is a long-time process, and one has to stay patient until it result gets shown.

It will also require some investment to pick up enough readerships, with the goal that a portion of the readers who will pay attention to your content will share your piece of work on their websites.

Create Content that is Previously Known for Getting Links

When you are looking for your content topics, then make sure to look at the issues having the most referred links. Because selecting a topic having bundles of directed links will help in the growth of your domain authority. You have to keep yourself relevant to the audience and make it happen. You have to stick to the topics people need a referral.

Make sure to avoid the topic which is not common because it gets tough to get links. It is not wrong to write something unique, but if people have no knowledge about it or there is no history of the topic existing, why would people need links.

You can select the relevant topics by contacting the authority a well. Contact the people who are featured in the issues on the top ranking of the people, or reach the people who have used that content in their topics. In this way, you will get more information about the subject, and it will help you choose something existing, and people can relate to it.

Optimize Your Content

Website design or SEO matters for both Google web index positioning just as your domain authority, so ensure that you upgrade all your title labels, all the pictures alt labels, the on-page code, and the website itself. Moreover, make sure to keep the entirety of your permalinks precise and relatable, incorporate varieties of your primary catchphrases, and make a sidebar area for new posts. It will help you increase traffic on your page, which is beneficial for getting higher ranks in Google.

Author Bio:

Arslan Haider is the author of the above blog. He has done his Bachelor in Computer Science from University of Wah. He is a professional Guest Blogger at Mediahicon and loves to write blogs on valuable topics.

Ways to Make Your Digital Marketing More Effective in 2021

Author: Arslan Haider

Digital marketing has emerged as the most effective advertising medium in the recent decade. Marketing has become easy due to digitization and everybody is incorporating digital marketing in their businesses. Also, digital marketing has far wider reach than traditional marketing. It is economical as compared to other forms of marketing. The trends have been continuously changing with time. COVID-19 has transformed the entire dynamics of business. Due to COVID-19, digital marketing has gained more relevance and everyone is opting for it as a means to survive in the recent situation. It has been observed that companies have started investing more in digital marketing. Every year comes with a different theme and trend shift, so companies have prepared themselves to come up with more effective digital marketing strategies in 2021. Here we shall discuss a few of the ways that you can take up for effective digital marketing strategy in 2021.

Social Media:

It is recommended to drive your digital marketing in the field of social media. Invest maximum in designing social media strategies. Research suggests that due to COVID-19, a lot of people shifted online and started buying their products and services through social media. The same strategy is working for 2021. A strong social media strategy will lead to customer retention and will generate more leads. You should post regular content in order to engage maximum customers. You can create a poll to drive customer reviews. So, it is important to design a proper content plan and schedule the posts with respect to days. Keep your customers engaged. Through regular updates about your product.

Micro Influencers:

Micro-influencers are the people who have a good following on social media and they have a say in people’s life. Their opinions and views are seriously considered by the people. It is because they know the art of writing relevant content and the right timing to say it. These micro-influencers can be the start of any social media forum including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. People used to trust their views and relate to them. You may connect with the influencers of social media in order to launch your product and maximize the reach of your brand. In this way, a wider audience gets to know about your product. Research suggests that 2021 has seen the massive incorporation of influencer marketing in digital marketing. Every company is taking influencers on board. This is because this type of marketing costs less and benefits more. So you can bring in influences on board if you want to be aware of maximum people about your brand.

Interactive Marketing:

It is recommended to do interactive marketing with your customers on your website and social media. You can add any personalized feature on your website and social media pages in order to engage the customers. In this way, customers will feel connected to your product. It is recommended to research more about the people who are following your product and use the data for putting up an interactive system on your site and social media platforms.

Mobile Marketing:

Nowadays, people use mobile phones for every online work. Everything is handled on a small mobile screen. It is recommended to create and optimize the content and website, keeping in view the customers that use mobile because mobile marketing leads to instant results. You can get instant feedback about your brand or product if you have incorporated mobile marketing well.

Personalized Content:

Content personalization has become an effective marketing tool.202 has seen massive traffic on websites due to the personalized content. There must be a different strategy that needs to be put up regarding content personalization in 2021. It has been said that content personalization will now incorporate artificial intelligence to get real-time data in order to create effective and efficient content. So it is recommended to invest in AI-based software so that you can get and analyze the data, eventually leading to increased customers.

Chatbots:

Chatbots usually have AI induced in them. Due to AI, the chatbot will drive relevant data and references. Furthermore, AI and chatbots will immensely improve the content creation strategy of the company. So, it is recommended to incorporate AI-based chatbots on your site.

Voice Search:

With the massive use of mobile phones, voice search is becoming more relevant. People are switching to voice search instead of text-based search. Though search engines have not developed a particular algorithm for voice search, it is a possible innovation or improvement in 2021. It is recommended to optimize your content based on voice search because soon people are switching to vice search.

Novel Content:

The content you create for the promotion of your product must be of quality, and it must be unique. It is recommended to write interactive content that readily engages the audience.

Video Content:

Research suggests that video content drives maximum traffic to the site and social media platforms. In fact, video content is considered a goldmine for digital marketers. Therefore, it is recommended to incorporate quality video content that depicts the mission and values of your brand and describes your niche in particular. People get more inclination towards dynamic video as compared to static content. Video must leave an impact on the viewer, otherwise it will not be of any benefit. So, make an effort to make it memorable for the viewer. Suppose you are promoting kontorsstädning I Stockholm (office cleaning in Stockholm), then there must be certain images and specific content with quality voice-over so that you can engage maximum people through relevancy of the video.

Author Bio:

Arslan Haider is the author of the above blog. He has done his Bachelor in Computer Science from University of Wah. He is a professional Guest Blogger at Mediahicon and loves to post blogs with valuable content.

5 Key Benefits of Digital Marketing Over Traditional Marketing

Author: Mashum Mollah

Finding out the right strategy that would work most efficiently for your business purposes is one of the toughest and most serious jobs for any business. You can say, one of the main pillars of business success. 

With the change of time, the marketing patterns have also changed a lot. Strategies are being made that would be both cost-effective and efficient. And this in turn lit up the never-ending debate of Digital marketing vs Traditional marketing.

So, in today’s era, when technology has witnessed massive advancement and the competition is getting tougher every day, every business should understand the basic differences between digital marketing and traditional marketing, and understand which one is better for your business.

What is Traditional Marketing 

Traditional marketing includes those marketing strategies that can be done without the help of the internet. And this can be executed in several ways.

The ads we see on TV, banners, leaflets, posters, or hear on radio, fall under this category. Traditional ways also include references from other users. 

So, any sort of marketing that is executed without the internet is traditional marketing.

What is Digital Marketing

You have already understood from the above-mentioned paragraphs. Digital marketing is all of those marketing strategies that involve internet platforms. Any campaign that is done with the help of the internet is digital marketing.

There are many categories of digital marketing. There are several facets of digital marketing, like SEO, social media promotions, YouTube marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, and many more.

You can see ads on web pages, social media magazines, community channels, websites, etc. These all come under the roof of digital marketing.

Now, there are many people who still believe in traditional marketing, whereas many business giants have seriously taken digital strategies into account. Even there are many famous entrepreneurs around the globe who have thrived their businesses through digital strategies.

There are many pros and cons of both digital and traditional marketing, but here we are going to discuss some of the major advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing. 

Benefits of Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing –

  1. Better Reach

Where traditional marketing is limited to a certain spread, digital marketing has its reach around the globe. Internet is used by billions of people around the world, so you can understand that having a website that gives you an online presence on the internet is actually reachable to billions of people.

Creating a website is also very tough nowadays, there are several free builders available on the internet with attractive themes. You can also create one in just one day. Check out Shopify reviews.

  1. Cost-effective

Where creating a website doesn’t include too much amount of money, performing digital strategies also can be done at a very low cost. Performing SEO strategies can be done absolutely free, promoting on social media also doesn’t require any money, just create a social media page and maintaining your content.

Social media ads also can be done at a very low cost. Other strategies like email marketing, YouTube promotions, are also easygoing. So digital marketing is pocket-friendly as well. 

  1. Better Result

Where traditional marketing needs a lot of money to invest and that too limited to a certain reach, digital marketing has a higher reach with lesser money to invest. So, it automatically gives you an efficient result.

Moreover, when you can target global audiences through digital strategies, the chances are much higher of having more sales and generating more revenues for your business.

  1. Better Tracking

In traditional marketing, you cannot perfectly track the results of your campaigns. You don’t know how many people even saw your ads in the newspaper or leaflets or banners. 

On the other hand, you can track your digital campaign result much efficiently. You can use several tools for tracking and that too also free. You can check their location, timings, sometimes you can track the email ids, etc. 

It helps you to have an in-depth insight into your campaigns and to reshape it if needed.

  1. Faster Execution 

Traditional marketing may take a long time to give you results. It may take even weeks or months. So, it is a very time-consuming, and slow process.

Whereas, in digital marketing, the results come very fast. You can gain leads in no time. Your business gets instant publicity. You can even chat one-on-one with your consumers in real-time. You even get to know the campaigns that are not working for you and can go for plan-b.

Overview

Though there are many differences between both of the marketing strategies, both have some advantages over the other. The above-mentioned are the most basic advantages that digital marketing has over traditional marketing. Hope you now have a brief idea.

Author Bio –
Mashum Mollah is a tech entrepreneur by profession and passionate blogger by heart. He is on a mission to help small businesses grow online. He shares his journey, insights, and experiences at Social Media Magazine & Search Engine Magazine. If you are an entrepreneur, digital marketing professional, or simply an info-holic, then this blog is for you.

Painting and Home Repair Website Design

Author: Sean H. Website Facebook Instagram LinkedIn

Design Web Louisville was happy to launch a new website for our client, Clean Coats Custom Painting and Home Repair, an employee-owned painting and home repair company based out of Maryland and Virginia. The website features a clean and modern design, with a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for potential customers to navigate and find the information they need. The site includes detailed information about the company’s services, including painting, drywall repair, and carpentry. It also featured a gallery of completed projects, customer testimonials, and a contact form for requesting a quote or scheduling service. We found a way to highlight the unique employed owned aspect of getting to connect directly with your painter or artisan, which really sets this home repair and painting company apart from most other companies. Overall, the website because a great tool for showcasing the company’s capabilities and building trust with its current and future customers. We are confident that it will help the company to grow and succeed in the competitive home improvement industry.

Web Based Business – Digital Marketing Tips to Increase Online Sales

Author: Arslan Haider

In the event that you are maintaining a business over web, at that point there should be intense showcasing techniques. Here, we will talk about some of the tips that can improve online deals.

Deals cycle:

It is smarter to plan a business cycle for the item. Deals cycle is the technique to pitch your item to a client. It incorporates all the means to sell the item. Characterize the business pattern of your item, since it will decide the stage where you should do promote for your item. To put it plainly, all promoting methodologies depend on the business pattern of an item. Research do as well and testing for deciding the ideal deals cycle.

Checkout measure:

It is prescribed to improve the checkout cycle for your item. This is the most ignored promoting technique in a business. You try sincerely and contribute a great deal to arrive at the possible clients, so don’t leave a space for client to relinquish the truck surrender. Build up the checkout cycle simple, smooth and intuitive with the goal that clients may not face trouble. It is the best methodology for keeping your clients flawless. On the off chance that there are a few pages for shopping the item, build up an advancement bar, so clients realize the means to be taken further or have taken as of now.

Item depictions:

Clients consistently search for item depiction, so it is strongly prescribed to add the item portrayal. You can likewise give an item control having each insight concerning the item. It adds believability to your item if you incorporate client input or audits. These audits give a gauge to clients to buying your item. It is obligatory to add a different page for habitually posed inquiries. It is prescribed to compose depictions alongside catchphrases. Furthermore, it will improve the SEO of your site. It is smarter to streamline the depictions that will at last expand the positioning of site and your business will get noticeable, prompting more deals. Along these lines, item depictions assume a focal job in moving your business higher than previously.

Transportation costs:

For better client experience, it is prescribed to show the transportation expenses of an item. It is noticed regularly organizations don’t show the transportation cost and lose the clients because toward the finish of the cycle, clients become acquainted with the delivery subtleties. Show delivering subtleties at the corner where client begins entering his/her data. Clients don’t feel better on the off chance that they begin filling the data with delivery without having the expense shown over the screen. Make your clients of each minor insight regarding the item and the installment. It will carry more clients to your business.

Continue to shop:

It is prescribed to put the alternative of ‘continue to shop’ close to the ‘proceed with checkout’ so clients can without much of a stretch discover it on the page. In web-based business, such alternatives are anything but difficult to join in the checkout cycle.

Types of installment:

To carry validity to your item and site, it is prescribed to add the logos of various types of installment which your business is tolerating. You can add the true and mainstream security instruments to acquire the trust of the client. Security logo will make clients agreeable recorded as a hard copy their charge card data decisively.

Retargeting:

Retargeting is the best showcasing technique. This system become effective when guests leave the site of your business without purchasing anything. Retargeting is the mainstream strategy to catch the crowd for the greatest deal. You can put your items on the sites which are visited by the clients. Then, clients will see your items. Email showcasing is another powerful instrument to promote your business. Send special messages to the guests of your site. This will build traffic to your site, ultimately prompting expanded deals.

Computerization:

Email showcasing is more compelling than the online media tools. Gather the messages of guests through online media and make an email list. Computerization is the piece of email showcasing procedure. Set up the email robotizations like, welcome email, request booking email, checkout email, truck surrender email and so on

Update your site:

It is prescribed to refresh your site every now and again. More established sites are obvious objective for spammers. So on the off chance that you have as of late built-up your business over the web, think about building up a refreshed site. Clients likewise feel good when they visit the site with similar pith as other business sites, in any case there comes a sensation of suspiciousness.

Online media:

Online media is one of the developing and well-known discussions across the globe. Try to have a record on each web-based media stage including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and so forth. It is additionally important to routinely post the material about your business yet shrewd technique is to construct legitimate promoting efforts to develop your business. You can likewise remember video for your advertising efforts and post the video on all web-based media stages.

Assume on the off chance that you are selling the services of carpenters in Dubai over web; at that point, make a video of carpentry work of your organization. This will build the commitment of clients with your business.

Author Bio:


Arslan Haider is the author of the above blog. He has done his Bachelor in Computer Science from University of Wah. He is a professional Guest Blogger at Mediahicon and loves to write blogs on valuable topics.

5 Ways to Set Your Digital Marketing Company up for Success in 2021

Author: Eleanor Hecks Website Facebook Instagram LinkedIn

The past year has been challenging for many industries. Digital marketing has seen huge growth due to more businesses marketing online and even offering their products via e-commerce stores. You may have seen rapid growth and want to keep that momentum going into 2021.

With so many people staying home and spending more time online, it isn’t surprising the demand for digital marketing has also increased. However, just because there is more need for your services doesn’t equal automatic success. Here are five things you can do to set your digital marketing company up for success in 2021:

1. Keep Your Customers

In the climb to the top, you may focus on finding new leads and gaining new customers. However, you won’t grow if you don’t keep the customers you have. A current client is worth more than one who has never worked with you before.

Take the time to reach out to your list and make sure they have everything they need. Are they happy with the service? What results are they seeing? Before expanding and advertising to new people, take care of the ones already loyal to you.

When customers love what you do, they are much more likely to recommend you to colleagues. Word-of-mouth can grow your business beyond what typical advertising ever would. People are much more likely to try a business a friend recommends.

2. Improve Your Remote Work Strategy

Many people work from home due to the pandemic. The longer workers stay home, the more they want remote options at least part of the time.

There are always things you can do to create a happier work-from-home environment. Start with an analysis of how your current organization works. What can be improved?

Help your workers set up a productive workspace by offering credits for standing desks or other tools they’d normally have in an office setting. Talk to your IT department about ensuring they have the help they need to function at optimum levels.

Make a decision about meetings. Do you want to offer video conferencing or have workers drive into the office for a weekly meeting? Keep in mind that if you take on remote workers, you may have employees from all over the country. Some may not be able to drive to a face-to-face meeting. However, you’ll open the door to skilled workers who might not live in your area.

3. Secure Your Data

Unfortunately, data breaches are quite common. Small businesses are at great risk due to less stringent security.

Take the time to invest in third-party software to protect your customers’ accounts. Train your employees on how to keep passwords secure. Hire professionals to test your systems and see where your weaknesses are, and shore up any problem areas.

Keeping customer records in a cloud-based environment may be a good move. Most third-party cloud providers invest in heavy-duty protections to keep your accounts from being hacked. You should also install virus and malware protection on any computers in your network.

4. Generate New Leads

Finding new customers takes your business to the next level. Once you’ve ensured you’ll retain your current customers, move to other methods to help bring in new clients.

Advertise on social media by targeting your core audience. Write content that addresses a pain point your typical buyer has. Use quality content to solve your leads’ issues and then add a call to action (CTA) to get them to click on an offer for a free guide if they share their email.

Once you have their emails, it becomes much easier to regularly promote your service to those customers. Think about what their greatest needs are for digital marketing and present your case to them.

Keep in mind that many people have to see a company’s name multiple times before they recognize your brand. Make as many positive impressions as possible with testimonials, content, ads and contact.

5. Start a Video Channel

The statistics are clear — people love to watch videos online. In the 2020 State of Video Marketing report, researchers found 85% of businesses use video for marketing. People now use their smartphones to stream content.

It doesn’t really matter which channels you use. You can add info to YouTube, do a livestream on Facebook or upload on Rumble, Vimeo or any other platform available. People want information they can easily absorb.

Perfect your video making skills. You should promote your own business with videos, but you also will want to offer this option to your clients as part of your digital marketing packages.

Learn to Adapt

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s how fast things can change in the business world. Make a plan for 2021, but be open to big changes where you must adapt quickly. Even the way you operate your company might change suddenly, as those brands who suddenly had to go remote can attest.

Have a plan, and create a Plan B — and maybe even a Plan C. Keep your focus on your customers and what they need, and you’ll likely find success no matter what the next year throws at you.


Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.

7 Web Development Trends CTOs Should Be Aware of in 2021

Author: Vitaly Kuprenko

Development trends change pretty fast. For tech specialists, it’s essential to stay informed for sharpening the knowledge, while for decision-makers being up-to-date means withstanding a competition.

To help you grasp the web development trends for 2021, we’ve analyzed the market demands across different industries and the latest web development trends.

Here’s a quick list of what we’ve got:

 

  • Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
  • Intelligent chatbots
  • Responsive websites
  • Optimization for voice search
  • API-first design
  • Web push notifications

Progressive Web Apps or PWA

It’s probably one of the most meaningful trends of recent years. It’s aimed to make the experience that users get from browsing a website closer to native mobile applications. Therefore, more user-friendly and intuitive.

 

In simple words, PWA is a website offering features that usually accessible on mobile natives apps. Push notifications, offline mode, access to a camera are among those features.

 

A plethora of case studies shows that companies get an increase in revenue, conversion rates, and user engagements after adopting the PWA. The launch of the PWA resulted in two times more daily active users for Starbucks, while Trivago saw an increase of 150% for users who add its PWA to the home screen.

 

PWA let developers improve aspects that users hate about websites: slow load, no hardware support, poor user experience.

Companies Using the PWA

You can find the following companies among those who are already making use of PWA:

  • Alaska Airlines
  • Twitter
  • Starbucks
  • Trivago
  • Uber
  • Pinterest
  • Spotify


 

Tech Aspect

You may want to use one of the following technologies to build a PWA:

  • Polymer
  • Angular
  • React
  • Vue

 

One more thing that makes PWA a worthy investment is that they take up to four times less time to develop than native apps for iOS and Android.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages is the technology that Google first presented to the public in 2015. It has been keeping the position of the hotly debated web development trends since then.

In short, the AMP helps to build web pages that load insanely fast and work smoothly across a variety of mobile devices. Accelerated Mobile Pages load for about 2 seconds in comparison to up to 22 seconds for regular ones.


 

Google pays a lot of attention to the load speed when deciding how to rank them in SERP. It means that the AMP technology is also remarkably useful for building a healthy SEO.

Tech Aspect

To get started with accelerated pages, you should learn more about an open-source HTML framework built for this purpose on the official website. There, you’ll find documentation and everything else you may need to get started.

Intelligent Chat Bots

For those businesses working across multiple time zones and having a presence in different countries and continents, it’s essential to provide customers with timely support.

 

Human customer services are often costly and don’t provide the necessary 24/7 support, unlike chatbots. That’s why entrepreneurs wonder how to build a chatbot that’d cover their needs making it another web development trend for 2021.

 

The chatbots powered with machine learning has been a worthy replacement for humans in many customer support tasks. Chatbots can give answers to frequently asked questions, redirect users to the right customer support specialist, and even take an order.

 

What’s more, a recent study shows that 65% of customers feel comfortable handling an issue without a customer support specialist.

Tech Aspect

There are several open-source solutions that can help you build an intelligent chatbot faster:

 

Responsive Websites

Responsiveness is no longer a nice-to-have feature. It’s now a must-to-have feature for every website on the Internet. It has been a trend for many years and 2021 isn’t an exception.

 

Taking into account that an overwhelming number of users prefers mobile devices over desktops and regarding Google’s recent mobile-first indexing policies, there’s no other way to succeed on the Internet except for being responsive.

Optimization for Voice Search

The voice search has an ever-rising potential that businesses simply can’t ignore. The last year’s report shows that more than half of all smartphone users were using the voice search in 2020. This number is going to grow exponentially.

 

Bearing in mind the current state of voice search and its perspectives, it’s definitely a web development trend for this year. Companies will start losing money without adding voice search to their SEO strategy and providing the IT budget for it.

Tech Aspect

The Web Speech API from Mozilla can help you with this task. The API helps to recognize the voice context, respond to queries, and read text content.

API-First Design

With the rise of digital services and their connectivity with one another, API-first design has become a widespread web dev elopement approach. And it’s still a trend.

 

With the traditional development approach, teams rather focus on delivering a smoothly working app and pay little attention to an API. APIs are often perceived as side projects and might not be designed and tested properly.

 

The API-first development, unlike the traditional one, goes simultaneously so that one part of the team doesn’t have to wait until colleagues finish their part of work.


 

Tech Aspects

Here are some popular tools for developing a high-level API:

Web Push Notifications

Push notifications used to be a privilege of mobile apps for a long time. However, web apps with push notifications gain momentum. Push notifications on websites can be used for informing about a new blog post, telling that a thing you were interested in is back in stock, and many other situations.

Tech Aspects

There are plenty of tools on the market that can help you integrate push notifications:

Wrapping Up

So, we have the following web development trends for 2021:

 

  1. Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
  2. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
  3. Intelligent chatbots
  4. Responsive websites
  5. Optimization for voice search
  6. API-first design
  7. Web push notifications

 

If you’re building a new product or going to update the old one, it may be a good idea to identify what trends are right for you to start preparations.

 

Author’s bio

 

Vitaly Kuprenko is a writer for Cleveroad. It’s a web and mobile app development company with headquarters in Ukraine. He enjoys writing about technology and digital marketing.

SEO Trends To Pay Attention To In 2021

Author: Shawn Byrne

As we near the end of a truly tumultuous year that most people would rather forget, we look forward once again to the coming year and the changes that it brings, specifically to the world of search engine optimization.

SEO has evolved so much since its advent a couple of decades or so ago.

It only seems like yesterday when keyword stuffing was an acceptable way of getting high search engine rankings. Now it’s a widely-condemned practice by Google and other search engines.

The unmistakable emphasis on quality content today is also a far cry from the way search engines ignored it in the beginning. And who would have thought twenty years ago that mobile optimization would even become a thing?

Given that SEO is a relatively young and ever-changing field, we can only expect more and more optimization trends to pop up year in and year out. For 2021, here are some of the SEO trends we believe will impact the industry.

UX Will Blow Up

Over the last couple of years, people have been talking about how great user experience and SEO go hand in hand, but it’s in 2021 that we will see UX become a true-blue, honest-to-goodness ranking factor with the rollout of the Page Experience signal in May 2021.

When sizing up your page’s overall UX, Google will look at your site’s Core Web Vitals, a set of specific factors that focus on the most critical aspects of the user experience such as loading, interactivity, visual stability while loading.

The Core Web Vitals will then be combined with other search signals for page experience like mobile-friendliness, browsing safety, HTTPS-security, and lack of interstitial pop-ups to get a clear picture of the quality of the experience a user goes through when exploring a web page.

Although how Core Web Vitals will directly impact your rankings is still unknown, it’s probably safe to say that getting an excellent page experience score could increase your chances for higher rankings. We have to wait until next year to see what happens, though.

Site Speed Will Matter More Than Ever

Improving site speed has always been a trend year in and year out, mainly because users will always have an insatiable need for speed.

These days, users expect the web pages they access to load in three seconds or less.

If your pages load more slowly than that, you will need to speed things up by optimizing your images for size, content optimization, reducing redirects, and switching to a better web hosting provider.

Voice Search Will Grow Bigger

One clear indicator that voice search will only grow bigger in the coming years is the number of households with at least one smart speaker, the device of choice of voice searchers for their search engine queries.

According to Statista, 35% of U.S. households have at least one smart speaker as of 2019, but that figure is poised to balloon over the years to 75% by 2025.

With the continued rise of voice search, the people who do SEO would do well to optimize for it. They can do things like target long-tail key phrases, use conversational language when creating content, and improve content readability to perform well in voice search results.

Mobile-friendliness Will Grow In Importance

Being mobile-friendly has always been important over the last few years, given that it’s actually a ranking factor.

However, Google’s scheduled rollout of mobile-first indexing for all websites in March 2021 is going to change the mobile game forever.

Starting March next year, the mobile version of your website will be Google’s primary basis when indexing and ranking it. That means your site must perform well on mobile devices or face the risk of your pages dropping in Google search rankings.

Find out how mobile-friendly your site is by checking out Google’s Mobile Friendly Test.

These trends are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg as far as 2021 SEO trends are concerned. While trends may come and go, the ones listed above are likely to be around for a long time. Then again, change is the only constant in SEO, and that’s why we all need to be on the lookout for trends that just might become a game-changer for everyone in the coming years.

About the Author

Shawn Byrne is the founder and CEO of SEOPhoenix.net. Shawn started his career in I.T. troubleshooting workstations, servers and networks, then went on to doing SEO as a side project and quickly found success in ranking websites. It was easy for him to grasp not only the algorithms but also the technical side which most SEO strategists miss and neglect because of its complexities. SEO Phoenix then grew based on its own rankings and referrals.