seo

Make Your Website Mobile Friendly with WordPress Themes

By Paul B. Kaiser on January 30, 2017

If you still haven’t converted your site to responsive design, or don’t know what I’m even talking about, then you will LOSE customers! Making your website mobile friendly is a necessity, not a nice-to-have. Google changed their algorithm back in 2015 and if your site is not responsive it will fall to the end of search pages. I mean really far down.

Customers are used to smooth running, easy to navigate, mobile sites like Amazon, Target or Zappos.com. It’s what your customers want – and they expect you to provide a good mobile experience. With Wordpress responsive design templates there are no excuses for you to update your site.

Click here now to see if your site is mobile friendly.

Mobile websites are vital to purchasing decisions and habits of consumers. Google did some research and published the graphic below. Pretty amazing.

Google reported that,

“…in the USA, 94% of people with smartphones search for local information on their phones. Interestingly, 77% of mobile searches occur at home or at work, places where desktop computers are likely to be present.”

So, what should you do? Google offers up some information here. And below are some next steps and links that will help you.

What are the next steps?

Check to see if your your current site is mobile friendly, if you haven’t already.
If your site was made by selecting a template or theme from third-party website software, check out Customize Your Website Software for Mobile Users, which can be the fastest way to become mobile-friendly!
If you’re going to hire a web developer, check out our guide for hiring someone
If you want more information on the mobile website implementation process, check out our docs on Mobile SEO.
If you’re ready to build a mobile-friendly site, choose responsive web design. View Google docs on Mobile SEO or go straight to Web Fundamentals and Principles of Site Design.
If you’d like to learn more about making your business mobile-friendly, we recommend: The Mobile Playbook, Think with Google for the Mobile Platform, and Google’s Multi-Screen Success Stories.

Here are some of the top FREE responsive WordPress themes.

Engage, Optimize and Convert: 3 Digital Marketing Tools for Marketers

By Paul B. Kaiser on October 14, 2015

You have a blog or a website your promoting and you want to make some real increases in traffic and engagement. If you only have 30 minutes a day to spend on digital marketing what should you do? These 3 areas I believe will be the best bang for your buck. It’s easy for marketers to just say “engage your customer”, “optimize” and build a “conversion strategy”. But it always seems to get lost in the mix of digital strategies. Six months after the digital strategy was developed, are marketers still following the plan? Or are they just trying to get something live. We’ve all been there. So go back to the basics. Look at the content you have developed or already have in your arsenal and then – Fine Tune!

1. Are your pages optimized for conversions

What do you want visitors to do when they land on your site? Your entire content strategy should be built with this question in mind. Once you know the action you want users to do then you can find the tools for initiating those actions. You have a Landing Page – right?
Capture a first name and an email. Thats all you need to extend the conversation. Then leverage affordable services like MailChimp or Constant Contact for drip campaigns.
Use free tools like Google Analytics to monitor visitor’s paths to the website and once they are on it, find opportunities to create a more user-friendly experience.
Optimize forms on your site to build a stronger inbound lead funnel. If the user has an easy form to fill out they will complete it. Measure what your content is worth agains the amount of info you are asking them to divulge.

2. Optimize Your SEO

SEO optimization might be the single best area you can focus on. The more you optimize, the more of your audience you reach. And not the masses, but the people who are your customers. We’re spear fishing here, not throwing out a net. Know your audience, where they live and go fishing.

The SEO specialist on your team should ensure your content is optimized with focus keywords, Google-friendly HTML formatting, and a URL structure that correlates with your product keywords. Use hyphens, not underscore. No caps in the url. Optimize images with alt tags. These are all things your SEO speialist (or you) should be focusing on when publishing.

The best way to track and measure SEO is predominately held in Google Analytics. But there are some easy tests you should be performing such as:

A/B testing for your home page and messaging
- Test different subject lines and calls to action to see what approach attracts the most clicks
- Test different creative to see what provides better engagement
Google analytics:
- Traffic – track the volume of traffic and break it down into categories like organic, paid, and referral
- Demographics – are you attracting the right audience – look at gender, age and location
Devices – what is your audience viewing your site on. Is it mobile? is your site optimized for mobile?

3. Engage with your followers

Social media is a way for your startup to interact with current and future customers. Leverage your followers and make them feel like valuable members of your brand. Find out which social platforms your customers are on and build out a content schedule – be frequent and consistent with your message. As you can imagine the big 6 are FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. But it totally depends on your audience.

Lastly, nothing you try is a failure. Every attempt is a learning so do not hide from failures. Strategically approach these as opportunities to win over customers with good customer service and express your brand’s long-term vision as frequently as possible.

“Email is still the number one method of engagement”

The total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016. (Radicati Group)

It’s projected that in 2014, 191.4 billion emails will be sent and received each day with about 108 billion of those being from the business sector. (Radicati Group)

78% of marketing emails are sent to a personal email account. (ChoozOn)

If you have a little money this may be for you.

Facebook is the world: Facebook is steadily becoming a pay-to-play platform, and if you want to see any engagement you will need to invest into promoting your Facebook posts.
Sponsored tweets: While Twitter still provides a good amount of organic engagement, the microblogging platform also has paid solutions for businesses, with one being sponsored tweet. By providing a sponsored tweet, higher engagement will most likely occur with followers (and others).
LinkedIn’s premium services: LinkedIn is a inexpensive way to increase your connections and promote your services in a professional manor. They collect a lot of data and can target audiences extremely well.

DM in 5 minutes with Alexis Ohanian

Mobilegeddon Is Upon Us – Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?

By Paul B. Kaiser on April 16, 2015

MOBILEGEDDON is almost here. Are you ready?

On April 21, Google is changing the algorithm for its mobile search, putting websites that are deemed “mobile friendly” higher in the mobile search rankings. It also means that websites that have had high rankings in search results could lose their prominent positions if they are not optimized for mobile devices. If you didn’t get the Google memo your website may be at the bottom of search this April. So, the good news is that mobile sites will rank higher. The bad news is that mobile sites will rank higher (than a non – friendly mobile site). It depends on which site you have. Do you even know?

CHECK YOUR SITE NOW. Is it mobile friendly?

Enter your URL to see if your site is mobile friendly.

If your website passes the test, the screen will look like this.

“This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results,” Google noted in a blog post.

“Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high-quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” But, for companies that have put off updating their websites to make them mobile friendly, you will fall to the bottom of the pile.

According to Search Engine Land, the following are three recommendations to start assessing and optimizing your mobile web search presence. In doing so, you will provide the best experience to your mobile users:

Identify & Improve Your Mobile Web Optimization Status
Even if you have a mobile-ready site, it’s important to dig deeper by doing a mobile SEO audit so Google can correctly identify and serve your mobile content. Start by validating your site with Google’s mobile friendly test tool, making sure the site resources such as images, CSS, JS are also crawlable.
Assess Your Mobile Web Search Visibility & Traffic Behavior
In Google Webmaster Tools, identify the top queries and top pages in mobile search with the “Mobile” filter of the Search Queries report.Are the top queries and pages in mobile search the same as those in desktop search, or are they different?
Are your mobile users searching for the same information in the same way as your desktop users?
Which queries have a high click-through rate (CTR) despite not being in the first positions? Which ones have a low CTR despite ranking well?
Which search queries and pages are trending upwards in traffic and rankings? Which are trending downwards?
Further your understanding of mobile search visibility and user behavior by analyzing your mobile traffic in Google Analytics with a mobile organic advanced segment.
Establish Your Mobile Web Search Competitiveness & Monitor Your Performance
Use tools like SEMrush, SearchMetrics, Sistrix or SimilarWeb to discover the keywords for which your mobile search competitors are ranking, and use this information to identify more potential keywords to target.Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords your competitors are ranking for, you can combine them with the keywords from your top mobile search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools to create a master list of keywords.Segment these keywords into categories and perform keyword research with the Google Keyword Planner. Aside from suggesting potential new keyword ideas, the Keyword Planner allows you to view “Mobile Trends” and see a “Breakdown by Device,” which will give you an idea of mobile search volume and trends over time. This data will allow you to prioritize the keywords with the highest potential.

See full article from SEL.

At the end of the day, this is all good. And to Google’s defense they have been talking and warning about this for years. Yes years. So bring it on – I’m ready.

seo