Aaron Dobler, Author at LaunchUX

Author: Aaron Dobler

Nathan Neil Included in Finalists for 2021 Young Professional Awards

CHAMBERSBURG – Nathan Neil, LaunchUX’s Operations Director and Owner, has been recognized as a finalist in the Cumberland Valley Business Alliance 2021 Young Professional Awards in the category of “Entrepreneur of the Year.”

Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on September 16 at Green Grove Gardens (1032 Buchanan Trail E.) in Greencastle. Candidates were nominated by the community through the Alliance’s website.

The title of “Entrepreneur of the Year” is awarded to an entrepreneur or small business owner who has grown and developed a sustainable business. Candidates are required to live and/or work in Franklin County and be 40 years of age or under to be eligible.

The other finalists for “Entrepreneur of the Year” include:

In addition to “Entrepreneur of the Year,” the other categories being awarded at the September ceremony include:

  • The ATHENA Young Professional Award
  • Young Professional Employer of the Year
  • The Rising Star Award
  • Educator of the Year
  • Volunteer of the Year

“It’s an honor to be named alongside so many other professionals and entrepreneurs,” said Neil of being a finalist for “Entrepreneur of the Year.” “It feels good for all of my efforts to be recognized, but I must affirm that I would not be in this position without my dedicated team and my mentors who continue to set the bar high.”

He added: “The Young Professional Awards are proof that the entrepreneurial spirit is strong – and growing stronger – in Franklin County.”

LaunchUX is a boutique digital marketing firm that specializes in building websites, search engine optimization and secure web hosting. Now in its fourth year, LaunchUX initially opened with a small client list and has had explosive growth through partnerships with large IT firms in Nashville, Houston, Denver, and the list continues to grow.

Nathan is also the owner of Solinkit, a managed network services provider and tech support firm that has served southcentral Pennsylvania for more than 15 years. Solinkit was instrumental in helping several Chambersburg-based organizations transition to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nathan’s other ventures include Neil Consulting where he puts his certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP) to work for growing companies.

In 2013, Nathan co-founded Purple Deck Media where he worked to develop MobileDeck, a platform that made it possible for independent businesses to affordably build and maintain their own mobile apps. The company then turned its attention to TapLive, a cloud-based SaaS that allows users to edit the content and functionality of NFC tags. In what is believed to be the largest roll-out of its kind in the United States, Purple Deck deployed the technology in a Chambersburg-based pharmacy. Purple Deck was awarded two patents for its technology of which Nathan is credited as an inventor.

Nathan’s entrepreneurial journey officially began in 2008 when he developed a platform to help students prepare, reduce stress and enhance overall test scores – especially for those with learning disabilities. The project was awarded a research grant from the Shippensburg University Foundation.

He remains committed to sharing his knowledge while providing business owners a platform to share their expertise. He has published numerous books covering everything from his personal background to exposing common SEO myths. He also continues to publish and present his research into the implications of digital interactions in academic journals. In 2020, he launched the “Business & Marketing” podcast where he hosts casual-but-informative discussions with business leaders.

Nathan has previously been named one of Central Penn Business Journal’s “40 Under 40.”

Young Professional Awards information:

WHEN: Thursday, September 16 from 6-8 p.m.
WHERE: Green Grove Gardens (1032 Buchanan Trail E., Greencastle, PA)
COST: $50 per person
ADDITIONAL: Cocktail attire is encouraged. RSVP here.

Our Research Confirms: ‘Organic Search’ is Still the Best Way to Be Found Online

“From the perspective of new user discovery, we can confidently determine that Google generates the largest amount of discovery for websites.”

Not paid ads.

Not social media.

Not email.

Not referrals from outside sites.

Organic search.

The introductory quote is from the formal presentation given by Nathan Neil at Northeast Decision Sciences Institute’s (NEDSI) 2021 conference (held virtually this year). The presentation, titled “Data Analytics Applied to Business Advertising” was based on a research paper prepared and published by Neil and Joseph Catanio, PhD.

The pair had collected and examined data between 2017 and 2020 to determine the most effective place online to invest a business’s marketing budget.

Said Neil in an interview about the presentation:

“We looked at a couple of different things. We looked at organic search – websites that appear during just a regular Google search without paying for ad placement. We have referral traffic, which comes from another website – often a business directory. We have social media traffic, which is traffic that comes to a site that is labeled as a ‘social source.’ Facebook, Instagram, etc. We also looked at paid search, which looks at how effective Google Ads is. Then we also looked at email.”

They studied about 10 different industry verticals including home services, e-commerce and tourism. These representative verticals depicted a wide array of businesses that each rely heavily on digital marketing to acquire new customers. Many travelers taking similar paths to the same destination.

The data was then narrowed down to include first-time visitors who did not manually enter the website’s URL and discovered the website through a measurable traffic channel.

The results were sometimes obvious: Google is the leading search engine. (It’s nice to have the documentation, though.)

But sometimes surprising: social media trails organic search and paid search and it isn’t even close.

So, before you “boost” that Facebook ad again, here are five insights into Neil and Catanio’s findings that businesses should keep in mind when developing their digital marketing budgets.

1. Organic search isn’t the only path to getting new visitors to your website, but it’s pretty much the only path.

Organic search pulled in a whopping 68.51% of the new visitors to the monitored websites. Social media, referral, paid search, email and “other” contributed just 31.48% combined. Organic search brought in more than double all of the other measured channels combined.

2. Google isn’t the only path to getting to new visitors to your website, but – let’s face it – it’s pretty much the only path.

New customers are finding your website through organic search (overwhelmingly), and those organic searches are still coming (overwhelmingly) through Google. 91.05% of the organic searches in the study were conducted with Google. That leaves less than 10% of the pie for Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, AOL and others to fight over. And the slices get really, really small, really, really fast. Bing secured the second-place spot with only 5.34% of the market. We can only hope for AOL’s sake that 0.03% of all organic searches is still a relatively huge number. We don’t know anyone who has structured a marketing budget around AOL’s search engine, but (for the foreseeable future) we can’t in good conscience recommend making it the centerpiece of your strategy.

3. Paid ads are almost always met with a degree of skepticism – even if they’re the best answer to the customer’s search query.

Social media sites – particularly Facebook – have made it a huge portion of their business to convince you that the best use of your digital marketing budget is social media ads. The research is clear, however, that paid social media ads is a lousy way of attracting new visitors to click through to your website. Anecdotally (beyond the scope of this research), paid/sponsored social media ads are met with skepticism and rejected as an intrusion. The mantra of the day is to not trust anything that you read on social media, and that includes your ad. Social media is still considered primarily a personal experience, and when businesses force their ads into a user’s carefully curated news feed, the reaction will likely be negative.

4. Social media and email might not be great for customer acquisition – but they still have roles in your digital marketing budget.

While this research focused on new visitors, your digital marketing budget should also have dollars set aside for your existing customers. Social media is an excellent way to build and maintain relationships with customers who have already (literally) liked your business. They know you and they trust you, so they have voluntarily sought you out – of their own volition – to stay in contact. Likewise, an email strategy is great for turning fans into customers. The key here, though, is that customer has voluntarily opted in to read your social media content or emails. Social media ads are intrusive and in 2021 nobody should be opening unsolicited emails from businesses they don’t know. If you try to enter the customer’s domain without being invited, you will likely be blocked. Organic search is an end-run around this because your message is only received by people who sought it out.

5. The key to being organic search is to just be natural.

 If you want to be a popular person, all you have to do is be someone that people want to spend time with. But the harder you try, the more you will push people away. It’s pretty similar with acquiring new visitors using organic search. Create a website that people want to visit, and they will. People want to visit secure, fast-loading websites that deliver quality, regularly-updated content whether it is accessed on a computer, a smartphone or a tablet. It’s not a coincidence that this is exactly what Google is looking for as well. Instead of paying for intrusive paid ads, invest in your website and put your best self forward. If you do this, customers will literally come searching for you and Google will make sure that they find you.

Beyond Organic Search

Neil summed up the data:

“What I would say is that if they’re currently paying for social media advertising, look at the numbers and consider that an organic-centered strategy might be more effective and drive more traffic to their website.”

Organic search is far-and-away the largest driver of new site visitors, and Google is the search engine of choice for people searching for answers online. Businesses that want to be found should invest in an organic SEO strategy that includes quality content and back-end development.

There is, however, more to the customer relationship than simply being found. Future research by Neil and Catanio will examine the effectiveness of affiliate channels on conversions.

Said Neil:

“In future research, we’re going to measure gross conversions – what leads to the most turnover in sales volume. This study focused on how new users find the website for the first time. For our next study, we’re going to look at how search impacts conversions or online purchases for e-commerce stores.

From Page Three to Page One OVERNIGHT?! How LaunchUX’s Website Hosting Service Solved This Company’s SEO Woes.

When it comes to search engine optimization, the right words will get you far, but they might not get you all the way. There are many other factors at the website hosting service level that come into play.

A company that sells and services trailers discovered this when they approached LaunchUX about their poor search ranking on Google. When it came to organic searches, they just couldn’t get any closer to their customers than page three despite their solid content strategy and keyword management.

Like most industries, trailer sales relies heavily on SEO to edge out competition. When potential customers search for “trailers for sale,” “trailers in my area” or “trailer supplies,” the first company to offer a solution at an agreeable price gets the business. Even people who enjoy shopping around are unlikely to venture all the way to page three.

After all of the time and money they had invested at that point, the company wanted answers.

What was going on?

After everything else had fallen short, could LaunchUX’s website hosting service finally get them to page one?

Checking Under the Hood

The customer-facing content looked good, so Nathan Neil put the website through its paces and performed a series of scans to better understand how the site was performing at the technical level. The problem was immediately apparent: their website was failing all of the speed-based measures.

When we think of website loading times, we generally think in terms of inconvenience (and frustration) for the human visitor. Even a three-second wait can send half of your potential customers clicking away to a competitor. However, Google and the other search engines also take speed into consideration.

Businesses, customers and Google all want the same thing: secure, FAST-LOADING WEB PAGES that deliver quality, regularly-updated content whether it is accessed on a computer, a smartphone or a tablet.

If you’re not an experienced web builder, it is easy to focus on the content side of things. After all, it’s your business’s core messaging, and the content is often generated to address specific problems encountered in the field. This is a great start, but true optimization is in the details.

It can be much more difficult to incorporate things like SSL certificates for security, mobile-friendly design elements and – as our trailer-selling friends discovered – loading times.

But if even one of these pieces is missing, your search engine ranking will suffer. In this case it meant the difference between page one and page three.

This was an example of how you can have the best content strategy in the world, but if you overlook something on the technical side, you can hinder your results out of the gate.

The next challenge was determining how to get their website up to speed.

Swtiching to LaunchUX’s Custom Server and Website Hosting Service

Slow page-load speeds were apparently the problem, and the solution was obvious.

By transferring their website to LaunchUX’s custom-designed server, Nathan solved their speed problems and got them to page one of the search results overnight.

We generally talk about SEO – particularly organic search – as being a long-term process, so how was it possible for Nathan to achieve these results so quickly?

While other hosting companies rely on open source software such as Apache, LaunchUX uses commercial-grade software and web-building tools like LiteSpeed. We love open source, but professional problems require professional solutions. Using professional software for professional businesses allows companies to put forth the best possible online presence without sacrificing page-load scores.

The results can be clearly demonstrated and measured through scan-based analyses and – most importantly – the search rankings.

Website Hosting Service by LaunchUX

LaunchUX’s website hosting service offer cutting-edge features, outstanding scalability and best-in-class performance.

We also include a 99.9% financially-backed uptime promise. What good is making it to the number one spot if your site is down when people get there? Additionally, we provide around-the-clock support with most incidents resolved in one hour.

LaunchUX offers website hosting service for businesses of all sizes – Starter, Business and Premium – that include everything a website needs to be found online. All three website hosting service packages are secure, backed-up, mobile-friendly and – of course – fast loading.

If your website is buried on page three of the search results and nothing seems to help, contact LaunchUX to discuss how our website hosting service can get you to the top spot.

Time for a New Website? Three Updates We Made (That You Should Make, Too)

Identifying the right time to get a website for your business is easy: Immediately. (As in: If you don’t have a website, contact us immediately).

However, identifying the best time to update, enhance or overhaul an existing website is much more nebulous. As an important part of your brand’s identity, it’s tempting to pretend that it’s chiseled in stone and let it stand the tests of time. On the other hand, it would be fun to do 365 versions and treat them like a digital page-a-day calendar.

The answer is definitely a middle path between these extremes.

At LaunchUX, we recently launched a new version of our website, and we thought it might be beneficial for existing clients, prospective clients and people who just like to read about web design for us to talk candidly about what we have updated and why we chose to update it.

Our old site had served us well for more than three years. It was a good site, and there wasn’t anything wrong with it per se. When we were starting out, we latched onto words like “elegant” (as in “elegant user experiences”), “professional” and “corporate,” and the old site visually presented us as such.

We are, of course, still professional providers of elegant solutions for corporate clients.

But you can hear it and feel it in the italicized portion of that last sentence. There’s a stiffness, a rigidity.

And that’s not us.

Professional and elegant? Sure.

But not stiff.

We deliver those solutions by being fun, approachable geeks that get results, and we wanted an online presence that showed that.

How and when to update your website will vary. A high-level technology company that sells to equally high-level businesses might get more mileage out of their website than, say, a startup’s app that targets younger consumers on phones, tablets and video game consoles. The startup’s very survival could be determined by how well it surfs the bleeding edge of web design including the ability to play videos and navigate by swipe.

Whether your industry moves quickly or slowly, the decision to overhaul an entire website will almost always be based on:

  • Changes in design (across the industry)
  • Changes in user behavior (across our website)
  • Changes in the company (across the years)

You should also keep in mind what you want your site to do. Unless you’re playing an extremely long game with your content marketing strategy, you will want your website to do more than simply inform or create awareness. For most of our clients (and ourselves), the goal is to generate more leads. Visitors are nice, but at the end of the day, we want a percentage of them to transition to customers.

So we looked at the design trends, our user engagement and ourselves, and the answer on all three counts was that we could be doing better. We could tighten things up a bit. We could generate more leads. And we could build a site that more closely matched how it feels to work with us.

So we did.

Here were three things we adjusted on our new website to enhance our visitor’s experience and generate more leads – and we can do it for you, too.

1. Use analytics to capture more leads.

We looked at our overall Google Analytics – our page hits, our bounce rate, and so on – to identify exactly where and when we were losing people. One of the biggest determinations was that we had way too much text about our Products and Services. It’s no secret that online customers want easily-scannable text (usability expert Jakob Nielsen has been consistent on this point for decades), so we distilled the paragraphs into their essential bullet points.

Our SEO page, for example, informs visitors that optimization will generate more traffic, more traffic means more visitors, and more visitors means more leads. Then we include a link to a substantially more in-depth overview of the benefits of SEO, but that information kept out of sight until the visitor chooses to access it. There is a temptation to put everything out at once hoping that something will catch the reader’s eye, but – as we learned with our Franklin County Free Press project – less is more. The user will determine what they want to read and when they want to read it – and they’ll be more engaged because they took it upon themselves.

A streamlined website introduces the service or product, provides an overview of the features/benefits, and some testimonials to increase your authority and trustworthiness. Testing will help identify where to put the call to action, but anything else should be added with careful deliberation – interesting and engaging content can keep them on the line until you can convert them, but they will click away the second they feel bored or confused.

2. Optimize your new website for mobile devices and mobile users.

80% of our traffic is coming from mobile devices. This trend has been continuing for as long as we’ve been doing this, and it’s a safe bet that it will continue continuing for the foreseeable future. As a web design firm, our old website was, of course, built to look great on desktop computers, smartphones and tablets, but now we’re taking it to the next level.

Our new site is a “mobile-first” site. While it will still look great regardless of the device, the entire user experience has been optimized specifically for mobile phone users. Being mobile-friendly is similar to search engine optimization in that you get the best results by focusing on the end user.

Connecting back to point one: Content is still king, but you can have the best content ever written, and if the design and the UX is lacking, it won’t have the desired impact. Content, design and UX are the tripod upon which great websites stand, and on mobile devices – even more so than on desktop computers – customers need easily-scannable, easily-digestible bits of information.

3. Reflect your corporate culture throughout your new website.

We haven’t changed so much as we now have a better understanding of how we partner with clients and how our solutions fit into their plans. Brands evolve and change over time. Three years ago, we knew what we did (provide elegant solutions), but we didn’t really know ourselves. It turns out that we are fun, approachable geeks that get results. Our website gives us a way to artistically express that personality.

Is it time for a new website?

The answer is different for every business, but if you’re seeing fewer leads, negative trends in your analytics or you no longer recognize the company described in your own website, then it might be time to make the change.

Very few businesses (we can’t think of any off-hand) can put up a great website that will be just as effective 10 years later. Today, it makes more sense to start with an awesome website (we can do that) as a solid foundation, but then perform periodic facelifts to reflect the ever-changing marketplace and keep your brand relevant (we can do that, too).

Not only can we build – or rebuild – websites, but we can also help you understand your website’s analytics, so you can make sure that your website continues to meet your goals.

If any of these scenarios sound like you, feel free to engage with our call-to-action right…here.

A State of Perpetual Optimization: Three Axioms of SEO

Every month we have a meeting with one of our long-term search engine optimization, social media and content marketing clients. We open by casually catching up and discussing what is going on in their world.

Topics may include information such as employee achievements, industry-specific certifications and  promotions within their company. During this time, we will also discuss any customer issues they may have experienced that we can assist with.Then, we look ahead on the calendar to identify company events such as yearly gatherings and fundraisers that will require special content production, planning and coordination.

These brainstorming sessions (supplemented with additional interviews and photography whenever possible) will all become part of our content and social media strategy for the next 30 days.

After the introduction and review of the previous month, Principal and Project Manager Nathan Neil, presents the client with a copy of a detailed report of their search engine optimization (SEO) progress for the previous 30 days.

He then proceeds to thoroughly explain its contents and answer any questions that they may have as he moves through the keywords and key phrases by geographic region (this client has multiple offices in two states).

He will say things like:

“This phrase is way up right now.” 

And we’ll talk about why that might be.

“This keyword is down compared to last month, but it is up over this time last year.” 

And we’ll talk about why that might be (the client’s work is often dictated by seasonal spikes).

The client will then suggest areas that are important to them for us to focus on going forward, and we’ll explain how we plan to achieve that.

And then Nathan will talk about some of the maintenance that he has performed on their website including removing inbound links to their site.

And the first time this came up in a meeting, the client, with eyebrow raised, asked:

“You removed links? Aren’t links good?”

Yes and YES.

Inbound and outbound links are very important to search rank, and as a result of years of our ongoing content strategy to establish the client as an authority in their field, many industry-related companies and organizations now link to them. 

These links are very good.

However, of the thousands of websites linking to their pages, some of the ones at the bottom of the list are spammy and potentially malware-infested pages.

These links are very bad.

The client’s customers might not see or ever be aware of these crummy inbound links, but Google does, and Google doesn’t want to send its users to websites that are associated with pages like these. 

The search rank will eventually begin to suffer if these matters aren’t manually dealt with.

The question asked by our client – why remove these links? – is great because:

One, it gives Nathan an opportunity to explain the finer points of search engine optimization.

SEO providers should always be able to show their work and explain their process. Even a brain surgeon can give you an idea of how the procedure works and what you can expect. SEO ain’t brain surgery.

Two, it also introduces the subject of quality within an SEO campaign.

SEO tends to be perceived as a cold, sterile field of numbers and formulas leveraged with the intention of manipulating an algorithm.

SEO is really about building the best website possible.

In our blog “7 SEO Lies ‘Digital Marketers’ May Tell You,” we examined a few of the dubious claims and corrected a few of the misconceptions surrounding SEO.

This time around, we thought it might help to provide a positive framework from which we can discuss search engine optimization.

Here are three ideals to keep in mind when discussing search engine optimization that will help business owners navigate their transactions with SEO practitioners. These maxims require minimal technical knowledge, and they are written broadly enough that they should withstand most technological changes.

Most of the “lies” we discussed previously will naturally be avoided if the client and the provider keep these ideals in mind.

1.       Search engines want to provide the best possible experience for their users.

We tend to think of search engines as, well…well, we really don’t think about search engines at all. Search engines are like a sound guy at a concert – you only notice them when something goes wrong. A lot of work goes into ensuring that the experience is as seamless as possible.

 Not only do search engines want to serve up the information that their users are looking for, but they want to do it with the best possible experience for that user.

  • They’re looking for pages that load quickly.
  • They’re looking for pages that are secure.
  • They’re looking for regularly updated content.
  • And they want it to be designed for computers, smartphones and tablets.

At LaunchUX we have an ever-evolving statement that sums it up:

“Businesses, customers and search engines all want the same thing: secure, fast-loading web pages that deliver quality, regularly-updated content whether it as accessed on a computer, a smartphone or a tablet and is connected to an active social media account.”

Since your customers and Google want the same thing, we recommend that you focus on pleasing the customer first and then make additional tweaks from there.

What customers really want is quality.

2.       Quality is just as important as quantity in optimization.

People often talk about search engine optimization as if it was a complicated math problem, and while that is part of it, the truth is that without paying careful attention to the quality of your content, you could be spinning your wheels or heading in the wrong direction entirely – not to mention wasting your money.

Approaching SEO as a series of formulas intended to trick or manipulate an algorithm into putting your website ahead of your competitors and in front of your customers will result in a website that sounds as if it is by and for a computer. 

For the time being, your customers are humans who wish to be addressed accordingly.

The right number of keywords is critical. Too few and your page won’t get the search engine’s attention. Too many and you will be penalized.

Your site needs to be updated regularly. Quality, original content is good. Duplicated or syndicated content will send you down the search rank list and farther away from your customers.

It’s the same with hyperlinks (both inbound and outbound). Too few and your site will be considered a dead end – the internet is all about interconnectedness and rewards team players. Too many spammy, irrelevant and/or malware-infested links, and, again, you will be penalized.

Those numbers might vary by topic and industry, but the takeaway is that while quantity is always factor, the quality of that quantity is critical.

Even if your website happens to land in the number one spot, it won’t be as effective as it could be if you sacrifice quality for quantity because it won’t have your voice.

You might get more traffic, but if what they’re finding is a generic site that could belong to anyone in your industry, then can you really say that they found you?

Being found is only half of the mission. 

The other half is what people are finding when they click through.

It is important to begin with a foundation of quality messaging and optimize the copy from there.

If you try to optimize your page for search engines without a clear understanding of your mission statement, top-line value proposition and the other players in your marketspace (both your competitors and your partners), then your brand will only become hazier and less defined as you throw keywords at the wall and see what sticks.

If you’re pursuing keywords and links that are off-brand, you might end up doing more harm than good by pursuing it.

3.       Winning is an ongoing process.

The most insidious lies and misconceptions surrounding search engine optimization suggest that optimization is a one-time thing.

“We’ll optimize your site. You’ll be number one. That’s that.”

Well, as we saw with Nathan hacking away the toxic links attaching themselves to our client’s website, that’s not exactly how it works.

We approach SEO like an athlete in training. 

Of course, we want our clients to get the gold – and that is always the goal – but contenders become champions by competing against former versions of themselves. That’s a competition that never ends.

You can’t do all of your life’s exercise in one massive session. It’s not one-and-done. It’s the same with SEO.

The amount and frequency of attention your SEO requires will vary by industry. In some sectors, companies live and die by their SEO ranking. In others, a monthly blog update and periodic tweaks will get them where they want to go.

And what happens once you get the number one spot on Google?

There’s the matter of keeping it, sure, but there’s also the realization that that was only the beginning. You’ve won with one set of keywords, but each keyword is a path to your brand that you need to clear.

What are potential customers who have never heard of you typing into Google? How can you get your website in front of them?

You have to cast an ever-wider net and increase your rank with words and phrases that your customers are likely to use.

Pages within your website should focus on the most important phrases in your industry (after all, it is pages that rank, not sites), but the niche topics can be checked off with optimized blog content.

Blogs are an easy way to inject quality, regularly-updated content into your website that expands your keyword vocabulary (casts a wider net) and establishes your expertise within your industry with a depth and level of attention that would be cumbersome on a static “About” page.

The quality is every bit as important as the quantity here, too. Optimizing every page for the same keyword may seem like a winning strategy, but it’s actually considered poor form and will result in penalties. Likewise with posting recycled content.

To further complicate things, search engines are constantly optimizing their own search criteria as the technology improves. The strategies that got you to the top of the list in the early 90s will send you to the bottom today. Often the adjustments are small and technical, but occasionally, like in 2011, when Google introduced its “Panda” algorithm update, the shift can upend SEO as you know it.

A good SEO provider will stay abreast of these changes and help you manage your digital presence accordingly to make sure that your “state of winning” has as few interruptions as possible.

A state of perpetual optimization

If you navigate your content towards these three ideals, it will be well-received by both customers and search engines (and you’ll feel pretty good about it, too).

Once you realize that customers and search engines both value and respond to quality content, you can put your core messaging front-and-center so that a genuine connection can be made when people come looking for you.

And if you commit to producing quality content for your website on a regular basis, you will consistently out-perform the previous iterations of your digital presence and achieve a state of perpetual optimization.

Many of the “lies” that were examined in the previous blog don’t sound so bad when an SEO provider pitches them to you. When they say that they will add your site to various directories and multiply your inbound links, for example, remember these three ideals and ask if those links are relevant to your industry.

That SEO provider could be selling you the very same links that Nathan removes for his clients each month.

If it isn’t making your page faster, more secure or more interesting to your customers, then it’s probably not helping.

Customers and search engines want the same thing.

Write, design and optimize accordingly.

Learn more about LaunchUX’s search engine optimization services here.

CASE STUDY: Franklin County Free Press

Franklin County Free Press, an independent news website serving Franklin County, Pennsylvania, was launched by founder/editor/reporter Vicky Taylor with the ambitious goal of providing residents with free and easy-to-access local news.

Taylor, who produces and edits the majority of the content, and her small team of contributors post articles several times per day, and the content represents more than 10 primary categories.

If that wasn’t challenging enough, the site also has a secondary goal of developing an advertising platform that empowers small businesses to reach local consumers.

In order to grow, Franklin County Free Press will need more new visitors, more returning visitors, and the site will need those visitors to be reading more articles per session.

In other words:

More inbound traffic with a lower bounce rate.

Overall, the Franklin County Free Press had actually been fairly successful as it strove to please both its readers and its advertisers (two audiences that are notoriously difficult to please).

But there were problems.

And there was room for improvement.

Problems:

1. Franklin County Free Press was plagued by DDOS attacks.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks were overwhelming the server and preventing visitors from accessing the site.

Imagine 250 people trying to walk through a standard doorway – nobody’s going anywhere.

Even the most dedicated reader will eventually stop visiting a site that is frequently down.

This was obviously not a tenable position for a growing, startup news site.

2. Franklin County Free Press had layout and navigation issues.

In terms of design, the site was better than most news sites that we’ve encountered, but it still needed a tune-up to accommodate more advertisers while simultaneously making the site more user-friendly.

Pleasing both advertisers and readers can be a tight-rope act – their interests are often mutually exclusive – and it would require overhauling the site’s functionality.

While the site was already fairly mobile-friendly, there was a lot of work to be done here as well, particularly for tablet users.

Solutions:

1. LaunchUX’s secure web hosting.

First, we migrated the site to LaunchUX’s secure web hosting where our security solutions that we have natively for every client resolved the DDOS issues.

Additionally, LaunchUX’s solution has been saving Franklin County Free Press money from day one.

Previously, they had been paying for more and more hosting to try to keep up with the additional traffic of the attackers. Unfortunately, this strategy just gave the attackers more room to attack – creating a perpetual cycle of ever-increasing costs and attacks.

LaunchUX’s secure web hosting broke the cycle by stopping the DDOS attacks and making the site more stable.

While there have been attempts, they have so far been blocked, and the site hasn’t been down since the switch.

2. Redesign and navigation overhaul.

This was a case where the client didn’t need a new site built from the ground up. Instead, we took what was working and made it better.

We replaced the original box-style layout with one that was more minimalist in nature.

For example, the original homepage had made the mistake – as most online news sites do – of trying to show the visitor too much too soon. The hope is that the more they show you in the few seconds that they have your attention, the more likely you are to find something that interests you.

In the 90s, when visitors found your site on a desktop computer and read the articles on a substantial monitor, it made more sense to feature as many articles as possible as quickly as possible while also including a complex navigation menu down the left-hand side of the screen. Although, even in the 90s, web usability expert Jakob Nielson was harping on visual complexity and clunky navigation.

Today, the majority of site hits come from mobile devices with smaller screens. Mobile visitors don’t want to see everything you have. Instead, they want to see what they were looking for and maybe a few other things that are likely to be of interest.

So we shifted the emphasis from quantity to quality.

The current iteration of Franklin County Free Press’s home page is populated with articles from two primary categories: the most recent stories and the most read stories. This ensures that visitors are presented with the most relevant stories.

Then, we simplified the navigation to make it easier to find articles that didn’t fall within those categories while simultaneously making it more mobile-friendly.

With the new design, the navigation options are hidden until they are needed, and we enabled “reader mode” functionality to make the user experience more pleasant for tablet readers by incorporating e-reader-style options such as changeable fonts, sizes and colors.

The result of these updates is a better user experience for readers and advertisers.

Results:

In the 30 days after the redesign, we discovered that:

  • New users increased by 8%
  • Page views increased by 46% (people are reading nearly double the number of stories)
  • Bounce rate has dropped by 37% (people are more likely to view more stories after initial story referred through Facebook)
  • Time spent on each page increased by 48 seconds (people are spending more time on the site)

And since the start of the project, the average monthly page views have more than doubled from 60,092 views to 130,326.

Findings:

Here are two additional takeaways from this experience:

1. First, you won’t hear many web building companies say this, but the truth is that you might not need a new website. The results listed above were achieved by migrating the site to our secure servers and then modifying and optimizing the existing website to make it more access device agnostic (with an emphasis on mobile).

A few changes to Franklin County Free Press’s website boosted the overall user experience and made a significant difference.

It’s possible that your existing site just needs a few hours of our time and a general upgrade of the overall user experience.

Save the new site (and your budget) for a larger rebranding project down the road.

2. Second, “user flow” – how the user moves through your website and how easy it is for them to do so – is an ever-widening cycle for better or for worse.  

For worse?

Bad design makes for a poor user experience, which makes people less likely to return while spending less time on the site when they do go there. And they are unlikely to share it and invite others to share in this bad experience with them.

For better?

The opposite is true of good design. Good design makes for a better user experience so people are more likely to spend more time on the site, return more frequently, and they are more likely to share the experience with others.

We’ll dig deeper into the concept of “user flow” in future blog entries, but for now, you can use the example of a restaurant: the better the experience, the more people will return more frequently and get more people spreading the word online.

Conclusion:

We are very excited and honored to take on a project like this to support the community and the mission of Franklin County Free Press.

It all starts with a simple consultation, and our initial consultations are always free – whether you decide to work with us or not.

LaunchUX’s secure web hosting is backed with a 100% guarantee. If your site is attacked or negatively affected by malware, we will correct the issue and you don’t get billed for that. We stand behind our solutions, and if something happens, we cover it.

Everything You Need to Succeed: Website Hosting Plans

How does a $10/month website become a $50/month website hosting fiasco?

One add-on at a time.

The major players in the web hosting world (you may have seen their Super Bowl ads) like to lure customers in with what at first seems to be a very attractive monthly website hosting rate, but it is quickly discovered that the introductory price is for a basic (extremely BASIC) package that pretty much only includes the hosting.

But there’s more to launching a website than simply renting space on a server.

If you want managed upgrades and updates (which you do), an SSL certificate (of course), routine backups (can you afford not to?), and privacy protection (trust us, you want this) –

With those companies, they often come at an additional cost.

And suddenly your monthly website hosting rate has grown out of control.

And we haven’t even factored in the initial web building and design costs yet.

LaunchUX, on the other hand, recognizes that so-called “add-ons” like security, speed and SEO are actually essentials.

So we include them.

We offer several tiered packages depending on your website’s actual needs, and all of our tiers include everything you need to launch your project successfully.

All of the essentials are here.

A text-driven personal blog won’t cost as much as a high-level eCommerce site (because of their vastly different sizes), but both sites (and their respective visitors) deserve the same essentials, peace-of-mind and transparent billing.

Here is what LaunchUX offers its customers:

1. A flat monthly rate.

The flat monthly rate is based on a clear and transparent tier, generally determined by the website’s overall size and behind-the-scenes time commitment.

We’ll get more specific below, but all of the tiers include the security measures, maintenance and optimization that every website needs.

The major players in this industry often start with a tantalizingly attractive low monthly rate, but that number doesn’t include any of the features that are considered standard today.

When all of the “add-ons” are tallied, the actual monthly fee can be quite cumbersome.

At LaunchUX, we consider the so-called “add-ons” to be essential, so we’ve included them in our low up-front price.

2. Hosting services.

The secret of cyberspace is that every website has to be hosted – or stored – on servers in the physical world so that users’ computers and phones can access it as needed.

At LaunchUX we will host your website on our own servers that we control and maintain.

Additionally, your website will be located in four different locations to reduce the risk of downtime.

3. Managed upgrades and updates.

With Windows 7 winding down and the recent NSA alert regarding a critical Windows security vulnerability, upgrades and updates are a growing topic of conversation – and stress.

Whether they are entire operating systems, new iterations of existing software or security patches, it is critical that businesses (and consumers) remain up-to-date to maintain basic website functionality and reap the associated SEO benefits that come with a properly maintained website.

Without proper updates, your site could become a security risk to your customers or portions of it could simply stop functioning.

You owe it to yourself, your business and your visitors to provide optimal browsing experiences, and that requires updates and upgrades.

4. SSL certificates.

SSL certificates protect you and your customers by encrypting data exchanged through your website.

They are typically denoted with small padlock icons (often green) next to the web address bar, and it is immediately apparent to visitors whether or not the website has one.

Savvy customers will click away immediately if one isn’t present, but even those who continue to read your page won’t complete a transaction or enter in any personal information because the risk of exposure is too high.

SSL certificates are one of the quickest and easiest ways to secure your website and give your customers peace of mind.

And, again, there is an SEO benefit because it is in Google’s interest that their search feature direct people to secure websites.

Phishing sites and scammers aren’t likely to take the extra step, pay the extra money or attach their real names to their websites – all of which are required for SSL certificates.

5. Privacy protection.

When you buy a domain, your information is listed publicly.

Many hosting companies offer privacy protection as an “add-on” benefit.

But at LaunchUX, we believe that protecting your private information is essential, so we include it in our up-front price.

The only thing “transparent” should be what you’re getting and how much it will cost – not your information.

6. Routine backups.

Many companies offer a backup service for your website so in case of a catastrophic failure, it can be recovered and back up as quickly as possible.

But the “backup plan” that is being offered can be as limited as one snapshot per month.

While that might be acceptable for a personal blog or other basic sites that aren’t updated very frequently (although it would still leave you vulnerable to losing your latest posts), this is extremely problematic for an eCommerce site that processes transactions all day and night.

A site like that would require multiple backups daily so at LaunchUX we offer triple daily backups as part of our up-front price.

7. Enhanced web server capabilities.

Many web hosting companies rely on Apache, a tried-and-true open source web server to direct traffic on their websites.

However, at LaunchUX, we rely on the faster and more secure alternative: LiteSpeed.

And, again, there is a natural SEO benefit because your website’s page speed insights will be higher.

Plus, as with the SSL certificate, Google favors security.

8. SEO benefits.

SEO is complicated and ever-changing, but its core is actually pretty simple: Google rewards websites that make an effort.

And more effort equals more reward.

When we talk about SEO and hosting, we are talking about technical SEO rather than content SEO (keyword, headings, etc.).

Technical SEO includes aspects of your website’s construction that make it more secure (SSL certificates), load faster (LiteSpeed), and other features that enhance a visitor’s user experience.

Of course, we are also experienced and knowledgeable in content SEO as well.

Conclusion

What other companies call “add-ons,” at LaunchUX, we call them essentials so we include them in all of our website hosting packages with transparent, up-front pricing.

This includes managing your site’s updates and upgrades to secure your website and protect the personal information of both you and your visitors as well as regular backups so that if the worst happens, you’re ready and running again as quickly as possible with minimal downtime.

Additionally, you, your site and your visitors will all benefit from our faster, more secure web server software, and your site will be more easily found because of the technical SEO benefits on the backend.

Security, speed and SEO aren’t “add-ons.”

They’re essentials.

In addition to our website hosting capabilities, we we also provide full-service web building, search engine optimization and social services.

Contact us today to discuss your website project and how our comprehensive website hosting packages can get your site up and running with everything it needs out of the gate.

The Benefits of Blogs for Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing

As part of our content marketing services, LaunchUX writes, optimizes and maintains blogs for some of our clients.

We primarily write them for regional companies in specialized, highly competitive fields where enhancing SEO rankings and establishing expertise are equally important.

And blogs are a great way to achieve both.

At LaunchUX, we understand that you may have been burned by a bad blog experience in the past. Perhaps you tried to start your own industry-shaking, game-changing blog, and – like your monthly e-mail newsletter – it fizzled out after a few posts.

The industry was unshaken.

The game was unchanged.

And you became discouraged.

Honestly, you weren’t really sure if your blog was having any effect at all.

Without realistic goals and expectations, writing a blog can feel like you’re just sending your most brilliant ideas into the abyss.

Unlike your newsletter, however, the remnant of your blog-to-be remains permanently affixed to your site unpopulated, unvisited with digital tumbleweed tumbling by (or Tumblring if you launched your blog on Tumblr) – a living testament of your inability to follow through on long-term commitments.

When interviewing clients, we have been shocked to discover that some of them had been so embarrassed by their attempts at blogging that they secretly hoped nobody visited it.

Blogging ain’t easy. If it was, we’d all be bloggers. *Sigh.* Technically, yes, anybody can put words into a content field and hit “publish,” but without a structure the project will likely be abandoned, and the question has to be asked: “Is your blog any good?”

For that matter, what is “good” when we’re talking about blogging?

Do you even want a blog?

To answer these questions, we need to understand how blogs fit into the larger digital marketing toolbox.

To understand that, we need to talk about how everything connects back to this sentence:

Businesses, customers and Google all want the same thing: Secure, fast-loading web pages that deliver quality, regularly-updated content whether it is accessed on a computer, a smartphone or a tablet that is connected to an active social media presence.

LaunchUX offers web design and social media solutions that fulfill everything in the above sentence, and blogs specifically fulfill the “quality, regularly updated content” portion.

Here is how blogs fulfill these criteria and why your business should trust us with your blog.

1. Blogging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google rewards sites that provide visitors with quality, regularly-updated content, and a professional blog is a great way for your company to fulfill this requirement – if it’s done correctly.

  • Blogs are inherently dynamic.

It is unreasonable and unwise for a company to make substantial changes to its website on a monthly basis. Even at the most rudimentary startup levels, your company really shouldn’t be changing its core offerings, messaging and contact information from week-to-week. Blogs integrate directly with your main site and allow you to post fresh content on a regular basis so Google knows that your site is active and engaging – exactly the kind of site they want to send their users to.

  • Blogs naturally enhance your keyword vocabulary.

Even if your company only offers a single service (which is unlikely), your customers will be searching for it from a wide variety of vantage points. It widens the mouth of your sales funnel. For example, blogs can enable a solopreneur who makes ikebana flower arrangements to attract customers who are seeking gift ideas for Mother’s Day and interior designers seeking the perfect piece to complete a hotel restaurant. For website copywriting, this is a seven-ten split of marketing. For a blogger, it’s two well-crafted posts.

Each new blog entry is a new source of keywords – and a new source of customers.

  • Blogs contribute additional metadata to your overall web presence.

This part gets a little more technical, but from a search engine standpoint, metadata is very important in helping to determine which pages are given priority. Metadata is essentially information about the webs page that helps the search engine to better understand how likely your page is to address the searcher’s needs. Metadata can include titles, slugs, photo descriptions and more. Generally speaking, the more you include, the better.

2. Blogging and Content Marketing

It goes without saying that search engine optimization is very important. Your customers are searching for you online, but – if they find you – what are the finding? This is where “quality” comes in. A well-managed blog is a salesperson who works for you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week – even on holidays. There is a good chance that your blog will be a potential customer’s first encounter with your company. The foundations of interest and trust begin here.

  • Blogs are a valuable form of Content Marketing.

The key is to always remember that your company’s blog is part of a larger digital marketing strategy. Yes, your blog can be less formal than your other marketing materials. But remember that casual Friday means business casual Friday. The content being posted on your blog can have a conversational tone, but it still has to support your larger brand message. If your sales team couldn’t show it to a customer in the field, you probably shouldn’t post it.

  • Blogs establish expertise.

You know your business. Perhaps you’ve studied for years on top of an apprenticeship to gain your knowledge. Your knowledge has value to your customers. But you can’t convey five years of practical learning in a five-minute customer meeting. Blogs allow you to begin that education process long before the initial in-person contact is made. Once the customer is convinced, your blog will guide them to the website for more information or directly to the contact form. Of course, it works the other way, too. If you encounter a prospect while you are out in the field, you can guide them to your blog to explore the depths of your expertise on their own time.

  • Blogs demonstrate passion.

The primary goal of your website is to inform potential customers of your products and services. While it needs to be interesting and engaging, the real emphasis is on clarity and user experience. Your blog is an opportunity to go beyond what can be contained on the main portion of your website. As with expertise, if you try to cram all of your passion into your initial meeting, you risk intimidating a potential customer. A blog is your passion in manageable portions. Blogs are often thought of as being “above and beyond” the main website, so some extra effort here can go a long way in demonstrating your commitment to your field.

  • Blogs can be anything you want – as long as it’s good.

A blog can take on a number of forms. In fact, depending on the company’s needs, sometimes the “blog” is actually a “news” section or a “press” section. Some blogs are full of DIY tips while others function as newsletters designed to keep customers and employees up-to-date on the company’s activities. Some blogs are written as letters from the company to the customer. Some are written as white papers addressing larger industry concerns. Some provide helpful tips and ways to save money. Some announce recent employee accomplishments and certifications. They can appear is easily-scannable numbered lists or long-form essays. It all depends on the company, the audience and the subject.

The common theme is that blogs all establish your expertise and passion while boosting your overall search engine optimization.

3. Blogging and the Long Game

Growing trust and building relationships takes time. While blogs are known to go viral, they’re not as flashy as their social media counterparts (although social media and content strategies pair quite nicely).

  • Trending vs. evergreens.

As we discussed previously on the blog, once something is on the internet, it is pretty much there forever. However, blogs and social media posts are consumed in fundamentally different ways – yet they still have to connect to form a coherent strategy. Social media is generally thought of in terms of “trending” posts. Social media is what is happening now. When we see things that we like on social media, we react to them and share them now. Blogs aren’t as flashy, but they dig deeper so they’re good all year long. Unless your company undergoes a significant restructuring, your blogs could potentially be shareable for years. And topical blogs shared on social media can be a very effective combo.

  • SEO is an ongoing process.

Search engine optimization is never a one-and-done deal. Successful SEO requires a content factory capable of producing engaging, optimized copy month after month. Each post casts a wider and wider net (expanding your keyword vocabulary), but it also keeps your website on Google’s radar.

  • It’s a marathon – not a race.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog, many companies try to do too much out of the gate. They burn out after a few brilliant posts, and then the blog sputters and you start seeing multi-month gaps with each new post beginning with the classic apology: “Sorry I haven’t been posting on here as much as I should.” And ending with the dubious promise: “Stay tuned because I’m going to be writing on here a lot more.” Blogs require patience and discipline. Theoretically, if you started a blog as a startup and stuck with it, it would tell the complete story of your company. Slow down. These things take time.

4. Blogs by LaunchUX

Like social media, blogs are one of the areas where our personal and professional lives overlap. The connection is personal, but the tone still needs to be professional. Accordingly, the thought of handing your company’s blog over to a stranger to maintain can be scary. But it’s really not. Even when we’re doing the work, you are always in control. Here’s how it works.

  • We start with an intake interview.

The process begins with a comprehensive interview that will provide us with a thorough understanding of your company, your industry, your strengths, your weaknesses, your existing branding and messaging, and your competition. We will also discuss your previous experiences with content marketing and any other marketing strategies you might be using.

  • Then we do our research.

We take the findings from the interview and couple it with additional research to identify key topics and issues affecting your industry. This information will form the core of the blog writing process.

  • Then we write a draft.

We’ll figure out which formats are best for your company (see “Blogs can be anything you want” above), and we’ll compose a draft for your review.

  • You review the draft.

We’ll e-mail you a document for your review. At this stage, the document might not be copyedited, but we’re more interested in getting the tone and messaging correct. Not only is the information correct, but does it sound like you. Would you be comfortable showing this to a potential client?

  • You respond with suggestions and edits.

We incorporate those edits, and we study them to fully immerse ourselves in your brand. If the changes were substantial, we might send them back for another round of edits. This step might be more beneficial in the early stages of the relationship to build everyone’s confidence, but the need for a second revision should fade out fairly quickly. Once the changes have been incorporated, we move to optimization and publication.

  • Finally, we lay it out, optimize it and publish it.

After the blog copy has been approved, we take care of the rest. Keywords, imagery, headings, captions, metadata – we do it all. If you have contracted LaunchUX for your social media needs, we’ll take care of distributing it on social media as well.

5. Five tips to ensure your blogging success with LaunchUX

Blogging is a long-term strategy, and we look forward to growing your business and growing with your business. In some cases we have been blogging for clients for well over a year (in one case several years!), and after that amount of time, our values are pretty much in step.

  1. We do our best to not be intrusive, but the more contact we have with the client, the better the blogs tend to be. For some clients, that’s a monthly in-person visit. For other clients, it’s a quarterly check-in call.
  2. In order to effectively convey your expertise and your passion, sometimes we need to talk to your passionate experts. For most situations, talking to managers and heads of marketing is sufficient, but sometimes we need to go a little further into the company to tell the whole story.
  3. Blogs can be edited after they are published. Blogs aren’t chiseled into stone, so if you catch something after it’s “live,” we can make changes on the fly.
  4. We can handle the imagery, but often the businesses have already taken the best photos of themselves. Whenever imagery can be provided – or we are able to take our own photos – the results are better than stock photos. But stock photos have come along way in recent years, and a well-curated stock picture is often better than no picture at all. There’s probably a stock photo on this blog entry, and it’s not so bad, is it?
  5. You get out of blogging what you put into it. Even if we’re doing the heavy-lifting, the blogs benefit from quick feedback turn-around times and easily-scheduled interviews. We do our best to work around your schedule – morning or night – but we can’t publish something if you haven’t signed off on it.

Conclusion

If you are a passionate expert in your field, then a blog is an ideal way to express those qualities.

If you are a passionate expert in your field who is too busy running your business to start (or continue) a blog, then let LaunchUX write, optimize and maintain it for you.

Your website is a great way to introduce your products and services to customers, but a blog lets you explore those subjects in greater detail.

Additionally, a blog is an easy way to expand your keyword vocabulary and boost your overall SEO ranking by populating your website with “quality, regularly-updated content.”

Contact us today to learn more about how a LaunchUX-powered blog can enhance your digital presence.

Google My Business Part Two: Google Versus Facebook – or – Search Goes Social

In his book “The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google,” author Scott Galloway makes the case that it is very difficult for the average person to get through the day without interacting with at least one of these companies. Many people interact with all four of these companies regularly.

These companies are so big that we don’t always see them and so embedded in our lives that we don’t always notice them.

The “four” have carved out their own niches, but Galloway theorizes that a time will come when they will have to compete with each other because there simply isn’t anywhere else for them to grow. And that time might be closer than we think.

Google My Business appears to be an attempt to box companies like Facebook out of the search equation entirely.

Today we’re going to take a look at how Google searches and social media can be effectively deployed in conjunction with each other – and why you shouldn’t delete Facebook just yet.

The World Before Google My Business

Traditionally, Google and Facebook worked something like this:

Information-driven Google gave you the “what” of a business (name, address, phone number, website, hours, etc.).

Social-driven Facebook gave you the “who” of a business (posts, pics, videos, reviews, etc.).

The World After Google My Business

Google My Business has introduced many of the characteristics formerly associated with social media to the “search level.” When someone searches for your business, they don’t just get the core stats, but they also get the social-driven features like micro-blogs, pictures, videos, etc.

So if Google My Business is one-stop shopping, why are you spending the time and energy to maintain both?

Google Versus Facebook:

Google is for Search / Facebook is for Research

Trust – or rather, the lack of trust – is still a major factor in successful internet searches. As it stands, many people Google first and then go to a company’s social media page to confirm minute details like hours, location – and sometimes to confirm if a company even really exists at all. While they’re there, they’ll consider how engaged the company is with its audience, view some of their photos and check out the reviews.

A business without a social media presence is still  a big red flag to potential customers.

However, if all of that information is available at the Google search level – blogs, videos, pictures, reviews, and so on – then it is conceivable that at some point down the road, there will no longer be a reason to visit a second location like Facebook.

Fortunately, for Facebook, there is a second business use for social media that Google My Business doesn’t tread on…yet.

Google is for Customer Acquisition / Facebook is for Customer Retention

Facebook and other social media platforms are directed towards people who already know about your company. Not only do they know your company, but they already like and follow your company.

This is, of course, great news.

However, if your goal is to expand your customer base, your social media presence is preaching to the choir. Your followers already know how awesome you are. It’s good to remind them from time-to-time – and it’s good to tell them that they’re awesome – but social media isn’t an ideal platform for brand discovery.

There are ways to grow your brand on social media, but then you’re getting into paid services like “Boosting” ads and targeting ads using Facebook Ads Manager. There is, of course, nothing wrong with doing so if you have the budget and you can confirm that this is the best way to reach your target audience.

Social media is a nice enclosed area on the internet where people who share their interest in your company can gather, and the company can – and should – foster that interest as an opportunity to build and reward loyalty.

In this example, social media is incubating a strong customer relationship.

But the seed was planted by Google.

When people are looking to solve a problem, they begin by searching the problem. If they already knew the answer, they wouldn’t need to search at all – or they could simply confirm your contact information through Facebook.

“Problem first” searches are one of Google’s strengths. What searchers find here will guide the rest of their experience, and Google My Business provides them with everything they need in one place – all updated and confirmed by the business itself – removing the temptation to do further research on Facebook.

If they like what they see, they simply click to call.

And once you’ve completed a job well-done, direct them to your social media to continue that relationship after the transaction.

Speaking of which, if you want to know more about our services, check us out here. If you’re already a fan, please consider giving us a “like” and a “follow” on Facebook.

Google My Business Part One: Better Search Ranking, Better Search Results

We’ve spoken before on this blog about Google’s long-view approach towards overall web optimization, which rewards:

“Secure, fast-loading websites that deliver quality, regularly-updated content whether it is accessed on a computer, a smartphone or a tablet while maintaining an active social media presence.”

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but contained within that single (run-on) sentence is the framework for a successful long-term, organic SEO strategy.

An entire industry has popped up to help ensure that your business is the one that customers find.

But what are they finding?

Google is a content organizer – not a creator – which means that it can only present to searchers the information that it can find. And for twenty years, it has often presented searchers with outdated, inaccurate information for the simple fact that businesses change faster than algorithms can keep up with.

This is obviously bad for your business and your customers.

But it’s also bad for Google.

Google wants its users to find what they’re looking for.

And they want it to be fast, seamless and accurate.

The challenge is that addresses, phone numbers and personnel change – and for a growing business, they can change often – and it can take Google some time to catch up. And even then, the old information can remain in the listings next to the new information for a long, long time – much to the horror of the business.

Google My Business changes all of this by putting the business in control of what searchers find.

Google has effectively added a new dimension to SEO with Google My Business. We’re no longer just talking about higher rankings. Now, we also have to talk about better rankings.

Here are five reasons to claim your Google My Business page as well as some of the advantages you can expect when you incorporate it into your larger SEO strategy.

1. Accuracy.

Google My Business ensures that your information is up-to-date.

By giving businesses more control over their listings, they are ensuring that the information about that business is accurate and up-to-date. The business now has the power to go in and enter the correct phone number and address whenever they change. Assuming, of course, that the business proactively claims and maintains its Google My Business page. Inaccurate information on Google is then compounded and multiplied when aggregator sites and other directories scrape information from Google and broadcast it to their own audiences.

2. Conversions.

Google My Business helps you make the sale.

Traditionally, Google presented users with information and left it at that. Google My Business has the potential to increase your search-to-conversion rate by enabling searchers to lock in their decision much earlier in the process than ever before. For businesses that take advantage of it, customers can schedule appointments directly at the Google My Business page. But if the customer isn’t quite sure, they can access additional sales and marketing information without leaving the Google My Business page.

3. Widen the funnel.

Google My Business initiates the sale earlier in the conversation.

Google My Business has the power to expose more searchers to more of your content in the forms of blogs, videos, etc. (LaunchUX’s Google my Business page currently includes snippets of content and some of our videos). If they like what they see, they can make the conversion right then and there, but they are also invited to explore additional content presented on your Google My Business page, and if they need even more information, they can click through to your website to get the big picture. If you’ve invested in building a quality pipeline, you’ll be able to draw them farther in with each piece of information. As we mentioned before, it is imperative that the information on your Google My Business page is accurate and up-to-date.

4. Engagement.

Google My Business makes your searchable information dynamic.

So far, we’ve looked at some of the ways that Google My Business lets you convey the essence of your platform to searchers who are on the move, but it also increases engagement by encouraging searchers to call or message you directly – often at the top of a touchscreen. The gap between customers and businesses has been collapsed – they have questions and you have answers – and once contact has been made, all you have to do is close the deal. Google has long been a leader in online reviews, but now they’ve made it easier to turn both positive and negative reviews into conversations. Plus, the content of the reviews counts towards your overall SEO. If a customer praises you for fixing a water heater, that bolsters your search engine ranking in that category.

5. Analytics.

Google My Business lets you monitor your page’s activity to improve your performance.

Google My Business gives you increased visibility into how many times people view your GMB page, how many have booked appointments or called directly form your page, how many have clicked through to your website, how many times your company has appeared on Google Maps, and so on.

LaunchUX and Google My Business

Contact us today to discuss how you can claim your Google My Business page, and how it can be integrated into your existing digital marketing strategy. As with all digital marketing, you only get out of it what you put into it, and we can ensure that you get the most most benefit from your Google My Business page.