Is Blogging Still Relevant to Your Business?

04/30/201804/26/2018 mwon

Is blogging really still relevant in a world where social media allows you to communicate with your potential followers directly?

After all, if you can either write a 500 word post on your latest service or share the key points on Facebook, some businesses might now gravitate more towards one than the other for the sake of convenience.

The truth is, blogging is absolutely still relevant to your business in 2017 – and here are some key reasons why.

Blogs Fuel Your Social Content

You need something to say on your social media channels, and somewhere to direct your current and prospective followers.

Simply sharing images and links to your product pages suggests you’re only interested in trying to sell, rather than engage. With regular blog posts, you can consistently share high-value content on your social accounts to entice people to your site with something more than a purchase.

Share snippets of your blog posts as a teaser, along with eye-catching images that tell a story relevant to the content itself.

Blogs are Still Effective for SEO

Blogging on a regular basis enables your business to boost your visibility and authority in a number of ways.

For starters: keywords. Back in the day, brands could write blog posts consisting of endless search terms offering little value to the reader, but now Google’s algorithm is far wiser.

The emphasis is much more on the quality of your content rather than the keywords, but they’re still important. Use your most effective ones a few times in a post, but always make sure they don’t affect its readability.

Blog posts add fresh content to your site regularly, which is crucial for solid rankings, as are social signals. Bear this in mind: 82 percent of markets blogging on a daily basis converted a customer using their blogs, while only 57 of those publishing posts once per month did so.

Blogs can Help You Build Credibility

Having a wide variety of blog posts on your business’s website builds your credibility. How so?

Blogging gives your brand an opportunity to become a thought-leader, sharing innovative insights and influencing others. This can lead to your blogs gaining a wider readership by peers and customers alike, driving more traffic to your site over time.

Your business will appear more reliable and professional with a portfolio of well-written, well-presented blog posts, rather than a bare-bones site.

Blogs Allow for Deeper Communication than Social Media

You have to establish a style and voice for your business on social channels, and Facebook, Twitter etc. are ideal places to communicate with your customers.

However, blog posts enable you to tell deeper, richer stories unsuited to the shorter, sweeter structure of social accounts. Yourself and / or your team can explore your processes, motivations, missions, products, and opinions in more detail.

Your readers will get to know you better, and feel more invested in your brand.

Looking to start blogging for your business, or want to improve future posts? At Nett Solutions, we’re an experienced Orange County digital marketing agency dedicated to helping companies of all sizes build better results! Give our expert team a call now!

Are you Sabotaging your own SEO?

04/25/201804/26/2018 mwon

Are you Sabotaging your own SEO?

In our years as an Orange County SEO agency, we’ve seen businesses of all sizes trying to handle their own digital marketing campaigns.

We’ve also seen them make the same mistakes again and again.

You simply cannot underestimate the negative impact even the smallest errors can have on your rankings. You could be sabotaging your own SEO strategy without even realizing it.

How? Let’s take a look.

Are you Using Too many Keywords in your Content?

Choosing the right keywords to suit your brand, your customers, and your place in the market is key.

So is using them properly.

Keyword stuffing is less prevalent than it used to be, but some websites still try to manipulate search engines by overdoing it.

When you stuff keywords into your content, you’re sacrificing the readability for your visitors. Google has steps in place to penalize sites employing this shady tactic too, so you could be sacrificing your place in the SERPs too.

Google cares more about relevance and context today, so including keywords in a natural way without overloading them is vital. The most important ones should appear higher up the page too, to maximize their impact.

Are you Neglecting your Title tags and Meta Descriptions?

Your title tag and meta descriptions are vital to attracting prospects and improving your rankings.

Your title tag and description appear on the SERPs, telling searchers and crawlers what to expect from your site. You should include a keyword in your title tag and description where possible, and sell the value of your content honestly.

Pay attention to how your biggest competitors or those high-authority brands you want to emulate appear on SERPs. How do they phrase their titles and descriptions? What about them makes you want to click?

Does your Website load too Slowly?

How many websites have you left because the pages took too long to load, or simply didn’t load at all?

Think about how frustrating it is. Do you want to put your customers through that?

Google’s research shows that load times of between one and three seconds increase your bounce rate to 32 percent, while one to five seconds sees this figure jump to 90 percent.

Anything up to six seconds creates bounce rate increases of 106 percent. Load times of up to 10 seconds? Your bounce rates increase to a staggering 123 percent.

Compressing images and text can make a big difference to your load times. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) give you the power to make your mobile site incredibly fast, targeting the ever-growing mobile audience.

Is your Content Good Enough?

Your content should be well-written, informative, and offer visitors real value.

No prospects want to waste time reading text filled with typos, half-finished sentences, and baffling jargon. Your content has to give them the information they need in a clear, simple way.

It doesn’t need to be an industry-leading piece of work, but content should at least appear professional and provide searchers with the solution they were promised by your title tag and description.

If you think your website could be sabotaging your rankings, don’t worry. Nett Solutions is an Orange County SEO agency with the skills to transform your online performance. Just give us a call for a friendly, transparent chat!

5 SEO Trends Every Business Should Embrace

03/26/201804/26/2018 mwon

Struggling to keep up with the ever-changing trends in the world of SEO?

You’re not alone, but you have to make an effort to embrace the newest, most important ways to boost your organic search to beat competitors. What are the biggest SEO trends for 2018 you need to know?

Go Secure for Increased Rankings

Secure websites (those with a HTTPS in their URL) tend to receive higher rankings in search engine results pages. Though there are correlations between HTTPS sites and high placements, cutting-edge security is more of a tie-breaker used alongside other ranking factors.

If two sites are both well-optimized but one has better security than the other, the HTTPS element will win out.

Users are notified if a website they visit is not secure. Don’t give them a reason to leave.

Voice Searches for Accurate User Intent

Voice search is far more convenient than having to type your query using a cluttered mobile keyboard, and consumers are more increasingly likely to use it.

You need to focus on building content based around searcher intent rather than a strict list of keywords (though they are still essential). Your content has to be crafted to answer prospects’ questions, using a conversational tone.

More than ever, content must feel organic and valuable.

Focusing on User-driven Content

Following on from the point above, you need to make sure your content is worth readers’ time.

Put yourself in searchers’ shoes in relation to your products or services. What questions would you be asking, and what answers would you expect? What information do you need to be converted into a customer?

Try to avoid hitting readers over the head with directions to buy, buy, buy. Engage them, make sure you don’t waste their time, and they will be more likely to remember your brand even if they don’t actually make a purchase.

Video – A Growing Force

Video will account for 82 percent of consumer traffic online by 2021. It’s already everywhere, from social media to news pages and FAQs, and you’re missing out if you don’t use it already.

Create entertaining, informative videos on various topics. Make demonstrations for your products, take users on a tour of your business, introduce your team, and present customer testimonials.

Get on YouTube too: it’s the world’s second biggest search engine.

AMP for Stronger Mobile Engagement

The speed of your mobile site affects your ranking, and users simply don’t want the hassle of slow-loading pages. AMP is an ideal solution, creating mobile sites that are faster to load, easier to navigate, and make for a smoother browsing experience overall.

Integrate AMP into your campaign to make sure you maximize your mobile service.

Our team of Orange County digital marketing experts can create a bespoke SEO strategy for your business, incorporating the latest trends. Want to know what we can do for you? Give us a call!

What is A/B Testing?

02/22/201804/26/2018 mwon

A/B testing (or split testing) is mentioned again and again in the world of digital marketing, but what is it?

This can be an incredibly powerful part of optimizing your website and boosting your conversions. Performing an A/B test lets you compare two versions of a web page to identify which one works best.

This involves presenting the two pages to visitors at the same time, and whichever achieves higher conversion rates becomes the final version.

A/B testing gives you the power to make the most of your current traffic, and it can be applied to virtually any element of your website which impacts visitors’ behavior. This includes your headlines, sub headlines, testimonials, text in paragraphs, images, links, and more.

After all, Google is used to perform billions of searches each month, and you need to do everything you can to grab prospects’ attention.

Gathering Key Data

Before you run your A/B testing, you need to gather data that will ultimately help you identify the strongest variation.

Visitors’ behavior is one area to focus on, and certain tools can show obstacles that might prevent conversions or cause prospects to click away. For example, uninformative text which is too clustered together for comfortable reading, unattractive images, or an unclear CTA button can all contribute to a lack of conversions.

After exploring the results of such analysis, you would then be able to see where a potential new page would have to go. If you have problems with your CTA button or your text’s layout, you can create a new one with the same content presented differently.

If you can establish which of your options has the power to make a stronger impact on visitors, you should be able to increase conversions and build your user-base.

Trial and Error

It’s vital to make both variations as high-quality as possible, and give both a fair chance. Don’t be tempted to effectively sabotage one version of a page if you prefer the other, because what you prefer might not necessarily match your audience’s tastes.

A/B testing allows you to try different styles and presentation formats too. For example, if you feel your copy may be a little bland, your B page can be quirkier and funnier. If you find this garners fewer conversions during your sample period than the A page, you could perhaps try another new version that resembles the original more.

You can try again and again over time, eliminating less-successful variations and gathering data from the best to transform your site.

At Nett Solutions, our Orange County SEO team is passionate about helping businesses just like yours maximize your visibility, boost conversions, and ultimately achieve higher rankings. Give us a call now to see what we can do for you!

SEO Trends to Watch Out for in 2018

01/11/201804/26/2018 mwon

As we come to the end of another year, it’s time to think about what we can expect to see in the next. 2018 looks to be a big year for changes in the world of SEO, and it’s best to prepare for them now to stay ahead of the curve.

So, what’s in store?

The Future is Mobile

Mobile is a major player in SEO, with the approaching mobile-first index meaning that Google will look for mobile content before desktop.

Businesses should have been optimizing their content for mobile devices for a few years now, but as more and more of us browse the internet on our smartphones and tablets, this takes on a greater urgency

Mobile-friendly sites stand a better chance of ranking ahead of non-friendly domains, and local SEO will become more important in 2018 to help businesses target customers on the go. Expect to see more Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in the next 12 months.

Greater Focus on Voice Search

Voice search has been on the rise in recent years, with almost half of American adults using it every day, and it will only become more important to effective SEO campaigns in 2018.

You need to focus more on natural language and long-tail keywords to cater to voice-searchers’ conversational approach.

Feeling the Need, the Need for Speed

Making your site’s pages load as quickly as possible will be more imperative in 2018.

Speed is a key ranking signal and makes a significant impact on your visitors’ user experience (UX). Pages should load within three seconds to minimize the risk of chasing customers away to faster alternatives.

What can you do to make your pages load faster? Try making your images smaller, assess whether all of your plugins are really necessary, and look into compressing your content. All of this can make a big difference to your site’s UX, on mobile and desktop devices.

Visual Search will Become More Visible

The popularity of visual search will rise in 2018. Google Lens, the giant’s visual-search app for their own Pixel smartphones, enables users to aim it at a piece of visual information (such as a shop sign) and retrieve details on its business hours, reviews, and more.

People want to look at products, locations, venues, and more rather than just taking a business’s word. More companies will have to embrace the power of visuals, creating strong branding, product, and service images across their sites.

Machines, Learning, and RankBrain

Machine learning will play a bigger role in SEO throughout 2018, as the RankBrain algorithm continues to refine Google’s search queries. This aims to provide users with the most relevant results possible and avoid directing them to pages of little value.

RankBrain studies how users are looking for information and across which devices. Businesses need to focus on making their content as relevant and valuable to visitors as they can, without any of the shortcuts black-hat SEO practitioners used to rely upon.

NettSolutions, an Orange County digital marketing agency, can help your business’s SEO reach all-new heights in 2018 — and beyond. Give us a call to learn more!

Google & Tiffany’s… two peas in a pod

02/10/201002/18/2010 mwon

Some things in life are best left simple and pure. According to my wife, some examples are: Tiffany’s blue, a simple black cocktail dress, a kiss goodnight, her favorite pair of jeans, a baby sleeping and a classic Chanel handbag. Yes, she used the “handbag” card one week before Valentine’s day… and no, I don’t plan on buying her one. My list of things that are beautiful in their simplicity? USC Football jerseys (apologies to my UCLA co-workers), cheeseburgers, ‘65 Shelby fastback Mustang, backyard BBQ’s and that 15 year-old, hole-ridden, one-size-too-small, favorite t-shirt that the wife always tries to throw away.

All these things reveal beauty in their classic, timeless, simple states. A major contributing factor in Google’s rise to dominance has been their ability to grasp the fact that people can indeed find beauty in simplicity. It is widely believed that the average American is targeted by over 3000 ads and exposed to hundreds of them on a daily basis. Ad space dominates our surroundings and it is no different in the online realm. In a cyberworld cluttered with advertisements and widgets, Google continues to exercise its motto to “think backwards” by displaying beauty in simplicity. I noticed a recent change in the Google search page. Traditionally, the page would look something like this:

Google simplified things even further by removing all the peripheral links to reveal a pure, clean, simple search page:

The peripheral links in the image above don’t appear until you take action by moving the mouse over the page. You can call it the anti-AOL or the contra-Yahoo!. I simply call it beautiful. Note that I am speaking purely from a search perspective. A company like Yahoo! finds its strength in their network/portal. When it comes to search, Google continues to deliver by sticking to one of their 10 philosophical pillars: “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.” That one thing is Search and the newest change to the homepage embodies this philosophy.

We often speak to e-commerce businesses who try to jazz up their site with way too much text, animation, dizzying color patterns, or overwhelming ads. It should be well noted that potential customers and site visitors want to find the info they are searching for quickly and easily. Simple, clean pages do wonders for website conversions, visitor satisfaction, and bounce rates. The next time you give your site a facelift, I encourage you to take a lesson from Google and consider the ‘less is more’ approach. You can always give us a call so we can discuss strategies for your website.

While we’re on the subject of Google ads, I hope you were able to catch the Parisian Love Super Bowl ad this past weekend. I tend to judge Super Bowl commercials by watching faces of the viewers around me rather than how I personally react. I noticed the faces of the viewers at the Super Bowl party were absolutely intrigued by this commercial and actually enjoyed watching it. There was no humor, celebrity spokesman, or special effects. It was simple yet captivating… how fitting of Google.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYavikKP8wI

On a personal note, this commercial is the one that got my vote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rsEnwKrsvc

Michael

Nett Solutions is a SEM agency working with Yahoo! and Google. We are a SoCal based company built of an eclectic cornucopia of: marketers, mothers & fathers, husbands & wives, college grads & MBA’s, surfers, church-goers, athletes, comedians (and those who think they are comedians). Our common bond is that we like to help people succeed.

It’s a new year with new mountains to climb.

02/05/201002/05/2010 mwon

This is a fun and interesting time to begin a new blog series. The first two months of the calendar year always excites me because its earnings season, the aggregate holiday sales numbers are posted, the Super Bowl ads are creating buzz, many New Year’s resolutions broken by now, and the New Year generally marks a fresh start for everyone. This new blog is designed to address current events in a way that is informative and applicable to small & medium sized businesses.

As an internet marketing company we feel a high level of responsibility towards not just creating a good ad campaign, but also helping our clients succeed in their day to day business operations. We have the opportunity to speak with 100’s of new SMB’s every week. This allows us the ability to keep a finger on the pulse of the American business environment and offer fun & interesting blog topics that pertain to all aspects of the business. I understand words like inflation, recession, and unemployment raise barriers when making business decisions. I am faced with these similar decisions on a daily basis. At the same time we believe there is opportunity all around us. Our goal is to help businesses continue to grow during these challenging times.

On a personal note, I believe in people. I believe the small and medium sized American businesses must spearhead the charge out of this recession. I believe American’s may not have greater dreams that those in other countries… but I believe we live in a country that provides the best platform to achieve those dreams. Our passion is to use advertising and marketing to make dreams happen.

– Michael Won

Nett Solutions is an SEM working with Yahoo! and Google. We are a SoCal based company built of an eclectic cornucopia of: marketers, mothers & fathers, husbands & wives, college grads & MBA’s, surfers, church-goers, athletes, comedians (and those who think they are comedians). Our common bond is that we like to help people succeed.