You know that search engine optimization is critical for generating leads and growing your business, but it can be a challenge to get results from SEO, especially if you're not an expert.
You have to put significant time and effort into link building to increase your domain authority.
Plus, algorithms are always changing and updating, which means that you constantly have to adapt your optimization strategy to ensure that your rankings don't drop.
And even if you do stay on top of Google's updates, thorough and successful can take 6-12 months—or even longer. And there is no guarantee that you will get the results you want.
Of course, you can always hire an SEO professional to optimize your website, but then you have to invest in long-term contracts and monthly retainers, which just means more money out of your pocket.
So, how can you get the SEO results you need without breaking the bank?
Say hello to a little thing called micro-terms (see what we did there?).
Every day, we use thousands of words and phrases in our conversations. These are called "micro-terms." This includes popular slang or abbreviations that people might not know about but still use frequently when they speak.
For example, "fam," which is a short form of the word "family," or "bestie," which is a slang term for a close friend.
Micro-terms can also be acronyms, like ASAP or ROI (return on investment), but these terms tend to be so common that we don't even realize we're using them.
Understanding micro-terms is important because many people use them in their keyword research and content creation—but without knowing about these obscure terms, your business won't rank as highly as possible when you publish content online.
So, how do micro-terms help SEO?
If you're not using micro-terms in your keyword research, and if you're not including them in your content creation, it's unlikely that you are going to rank for these hyper-specific search terms. That means that people might be searching for terms related to your business or industry, but they won't be able to find you online.
As an example, let's say that a person is looking for a New York City dentist. She types this phrase into Google: "dentist new york city." But she's not necessarily looking for any kind of dentist. She may be searching for someone who is qualified to perform root canals and other complex dental procedures.
To make the search more specific, our searcher might narrow down her results using geographical terms such as "New York City" or by adding an age group like "children dentist." She could also use abbreviations in her search like "pediatric dentist nyc'" or "nyc pedodontics."
All of these keyword strings are micro-terms because they contain everyday words that people use in conversation, but have very specific meanings in the online world. Identifying and incorporating micro-terms into your content creation can help boost your ranking and ensure that your content is seen by your target audience.
When you begin to include micro-terms in your content creation, remember that they have a tendency to change from one day to the next. If people are using certain words and phrases on social media or sites like Reddit and Quora, it's likely that other searchers will use those same keywords when they search online.
The best way to stay on top of these changes is by monitoring what people are saying online and what topics are trending on social media platforms, such as Instagram (which has more than 700 million users), Twitter (310 million users) and Facebook (2 billion estimated users).
Not only should you monitor the most popular topics and trending hashtags through these platforms, but you should also be aware of the use of micro-terms that are specific to your industry and geographical area.
You can find many of these specific keywords by simply searching Google for phrases associated with your industry or by using keyword tools like SpyFu and SEMRush, which allow you to do the same research without having to type a single word into Google.
You may have never used tools like these before, but they allow you to view keyword data from all around the internet—even if you're not looking for anything related to your business at all. These types of tools are also incredibly useful when you're trying to see how your competitors are ranking in search engines.
The difference between long-tail keywords and micro-terms is that, while the latter are more specific, they also tend to have less search volume.
Micro-terms refer to a more specific word or phrase with a low number of instances per month on Google searches—for example "loan forgiveness programs." By contrast, long-tail keywords are broader and more open-ended, such as "money management."
Micro-terms are generally better at leading to conversions, which is why they're a great way of boosting your SEO efforts. Long-tail keywords are generally better at increasing the amount of traffic that your content receives.
By incorporating both into your optimization strategy, you'll not only get more traffic, but you'll also have a higher conversion rate and lower acquisition costs since your website will be converting people who are looking for what you offer.
Here are a few ways that you can discover some of these micro-terms to use in your website content:
How much money have you invested in Facebook or Google advertising campaigns only to gain a few new clients?
You can reduce and even eliminate the expense of advertising and devote that money to other business needs by taking advantage of micro-terms.
These more specific keywords have a high conversion rate, so they're key to helping your audience finding your content and generating high-quality leads who are ready to purchase.
Let's say that each conversion from your Google ad campaign costs you $50 per click. Your Google ads are driving a wider audience to your website, which means that many of those clicks may be people who aren't ready to buy or aren't even interested in your services.
By using a micro-term, you can attract a more specific audience, ensuring that you only send people to your site who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, reducing your client acquisition cost.
Why waste money getting clicks on ads with broad terms that miss your target audience?
High click-through rate (CTR) - Micro-terms usually contain multiple words, and they are far more likely to appear in search results than single word searches. For example, if I were looking for blog themes, I would be more likely to search for something like "best modern blog themes" or "best 2021 blog themes for SEO agency," rather than just "blog themes."
If your web pages contain a specific micro-term that a searcher is using, they are more likely to click through and view your page, leading to increased traffic and leads.
Low cost-per-click (CPC) - Because fewer people are bidding on micro-terms, you can get cheaper clicks than if you were going after larger keywords with much higher competition rates.
High conversion rate - With stronger trending content, you are able to reach audiences who are actively searching for information about your services or products. Using micro-terms to create educational blog posts that provide value to your reader will attract people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
Ultra-specific keywords have a higher conversion rate than broad terms because they target niche interests and have less competition. This is the biggest benefit of all: you're paying less to get clicks on your ads, which means that you can spend more on converting those clicks into potential clients. And those clients won't just be potential customers—they'll be an ideal fit for your services or products.
Long-term strategies focus on using low volume, yet highly converting long-tail keywords for your website content and marketing campaigns.
By targeting these more targeted long-tail phrases, you will be able to increase the quality of website traffic that comes into your site while decreasing the costs associated with acquiring this traffic.
This type of optimization can lead to increased revenue through higher conversion rates, as well as decreased advertising expenses or reduced need for expensive pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Creating a long-term keyword strategy requires a significant amount of time devoted to research in order to find the right search terms for your business. While you likely won't see immediate results, a long-term strategy is worth the investment and can bring you increased traffic and generate more leads over time.
The best part is that long-term strategies will continue to work steadily without you having to invest additional time or money once they've been implemented successfully.
To find the best micro-terms to target, you will need to do some research. Your business is unique, and your keyword strategy should accurately reflect the services you offer.
One of the best ways to determine which keywords you should focus on is to pay attention to what kinds of questions people ask about your industry or niche.
The easiest way to do this is to speak to previous clients and find out what questions they had prior to working with you. You can also visit online forums, like Facebook Groups and Reddit, to see what questions people have about your services and products.
The more research you do, the more comprehensive your long-term keyword strategy will be.
While your blog posts should be optimized for search engines, they also need to appeal to human users who are genuinely interested in what your business has to offer.
This means that you can't put artificial keywords into your blog content just because you think Google will like it.
Instead, write blog posts that target your micro-terms and phrases, but keep the text natural and easy to read. Your goal is not only to get people's attention with a catchy headline, but also to hold onto that attention long enough to convince them that you're a serious player in your field.
The more value that you can offer your readers, the better your conversion rates will be and the higher quality traffic you'll attract from search engines.
Instead of writing fluff content with clickbait headlines, you should focus on creating longer-form articles that provide valuable information and educate your readers.
By creating longer content with useful information, you can attract higher quality traffic and build trust with potential customers over time by providing more value than other businesses in your industry.
The more that your visitors come to trust you and your brand, the more likely they are to become customers in the future when they're ready to make a purchase.
You can spend hours researching and creating this content on your own, brainstorming ideas and potentially struggling with writer's block.
Or you can let us optimize your content for you using a combination of Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) and real-time discovery of these hidden search terms, where we can hyper-optimize up to 45,000 pieces of content in a single day.
Interested in learning more? Check out our program here and contact us today to get started.
Your business website isn’t something you can create and leave running. It requires constant monitoring and frequent maintenance and updates to ensure it contains to function properly and helps meet your online marketing goals.
An SEO audit can diagnose any technical and performance issues with your site, as well as review your content for ways you can better include your keywords and improve your rankings. While some of the issues discovered by an audit are relatively quick fixes, others will take a little more time and effort to correct.
A professional SEO audit can provide you with a comprehensive list of issues and help you develop a strategy for prioritizing and fixing them. But if you’d rather audit your website yourself, we’ve put together a list of questions you need to ask to pinpoint some of the more common issues you may find with your site.
An SSL certificate provides authentication for your website and enables encrypted communication between a browser and server. Installing an SSL certificate on your site is a relatively easy way to boost your SEO and ensure that your visitors feel secure when using your site.
If you don’t have an SSL certificate, your users will a “Not Secure” label in their browser when they visit your site, which will likely make them think twice about continuing to browse.
To see if you have an SSL certificate installed, type https://[yourwebsite].ext into your browser. If your site loads properly, you have an SSL certificate installed. However, if you see a note that reads, “Your connection is not private,” you don’t have an SSL certificate installed or it isn’t installed properly.
Fortunately, this is an easy fix. Talk to your hosting company about how you can get an SSL certificate through them.
When you perform a search on Google, each page is listed with a title and a description. Each of your pages should have both a title and a meta description that include keywords and describe exactly what visitors can expect to find on the page.
If you built your site with WordPress, you can easily add SEO titles and meta descriptions using the free Yoast SEO plugin. Your page title should be between 40 and 70 characters, while the description should be between 120 and 155 characters.
As more and more people use their phones and tablets to browse the web, search engines have put more emphasis on mobile-friendly websites as an optimization factor. Having a functional mobile version of your website also provides a better experience for your users.
If your page isn’t mobile-friendly, you may want to consider switching to a responsive theme that will ensure your site displays and functions properly on all mobile devices.
If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, users are more likely to become frustrated and leave. You don’t want to drive traffic away, so it’s critical to make sure your site loads quickly.
Your website’s speed is also an important factor in optimization. A slower site or hindered performance can have a negative impact on your rankings.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that analyzes your site, scores your speed and provides recommendations to make your page load faster.
You’ve probably seen URLs that include strings of numbers and letters that don’t have anything to do with the page. These URLs aren’t helpful for optimization or for human visitors to your site.
A descriptive URL includes keywords and lets both search engines and users know what they can expect to find on that webpage. Your URL should describe the content of the page with hyphens between words.
While technical issues can get in the way of your website performing well, content issues can keep visitors from staying on your site and taking action. Using relevant keywords and phrases helps your site show up in organic search results, improving your chances of ranking higher and being found by your target audience.
Your content is more than just the words on the page. It also includes the titles of your images and the alt text of each image, which describes what the image includes for search engines, as well as users who may not be able to see images.
If you use the same content on more than one page of your website, Google considers this duplicate content and decides which page to display in search results. This can be frustrating if you’ve worked hard to optimize one page for SEO and that page doesn’t show up for your chosen keywords.
Be sure to check your site to ensure that you aren’t repeating content anywhere and that all your content is original and informative.
Simplify your optimization process with our free SEO audit! You can quickly get a comprehensive SEO audit that will diagnose any technical errors with your website, allowing you to jump straight to fixing them and ensuring your site functions smoothly.
Click here to get your FREE SEO Audit now!
Chances are, if you’ve done any research on marketing your business, you’ve seen the F-word over and over again.
No, not that F-word. This one: funnels.
Every marketing course and website will tell you that you need to build a sales funnel to get more leads and bring more customers into your business. But did you know that your business, in many ways, is a sales funnel? You draw in prospects and (hopefully) turn them into paying customers. The only question is whether you do this effectively or not.
Before you start to create an email campaign, you need to figure out what your funnel looks like, and then you can determine how best to improve your funnel to get the results you want.
Determining the shape of your funnel involves looking at the visitors you currently have to your website, the leads you get, opportunities for potential sales, and the customers you have. Are you maximizing every opportunity you have to make a sale? Or are you letting some pass you by, maybe without even realizing it?
Look back at the past month of business and answer these questions:
Determining the answers to these questions will help you see what your funnel looks like and figure out where you need to work to adjust it.
Maybe you have plenty of leads, but you’re not taking the time to properly engage them and get them interested enough in your services to make a purchase.
Maybe you have a lot of visitors to your website each month, but they don’t fill out any contact information or transform into viable leads.
Maybe you don’t have enough visitors or leads, and you need to attract more people to visit your website and interact with your brand.
All of these problems are solvable. That’s what marketing and sales funnels are all about!
The goal of a sales funnel is to have people enter the top of the funnel as prospective customers and then exit the funnel when they purchase a product or service from you. You don’t want any prospects slipping out of the funnel partway through, so it’s critical to make sure your funnel is effective and meets your prospects’ needs.
It’s important to understand the sales journey each of your potential customers goes through. This way, you will know what they’re looking for at each stage of the journey and be ready to provide it for them. You also have to understand that not every single person will be ready to buy, but you can still provide them with information and nurture those leads so that they become sales in the future.
Next, we’ll look at the ideal process of a marketing sales funnel and how you can best move prospects through the funnel and convert them into customers.
No matter how great your funnel is, it’s useless if you don’t get people into it. There are a ton of ways to attract prospective customers, such as signing up for your newsletter, liking or following your social media pages, and subscribing to your blog. Regardless of how you do it, once you’ve attracted and connected to these people, they’re in your funnel. From there, you have to decide how best to continue to connect with them and keep moving them down the funnel.
This is why it’s essential to nurture your leads and move them toward purchasing. To figure out how best to do this, a little research definitely doesn’t hurt. Talk to former clients and ask them about how they chose your company: what steps they took, what questions they had, and where they went to get answers.
Next, map out your customers’ journey and find ways to add more value at each stage. Point prospects to lead magnets, blog posts, and downloadable content to help educate them and answer their questions before they even think to ask them. They’ll appreciate the information and look to you as a trustworthy source of educational content.
Once you’ve made the sale, be sure to follow through and make sure your new customers are absolutely delighted with your services. You want them to be so happy, they tell all their friends and family about you. The better you understand your customers, the easier it will be to make them happy by giving them the service and products they truly want. Think about little extra touches you can add to pleasantly surprise them, whether that’s delivering their products early or throwing in a free bonus.
Understanding how potential customers move through your sales process can help you tighten up your funnel and create a better sales journey for your prospects!
Need help crafting your funnel into the perfect lead-generating, customer-creating machine? We can help. Learn more about our Managed Marketing Services.
If you own a small business, having a web presence should be part of your business plan.
A website establishes your brand and credibility, markets your business, expands your reach to a wider audience, is always available, saves you time, improves customer service and provides you a medium to showcase your work.
As a business owner, you probably don’t know much about building a website and don’t have a lot of time to learn. You know you need a website for your business, but are faced with a decision to make, build your own website or hire a web professional to do it for you.
In this article, I’ll help you determine if you should build your own website yourself or hire a professional.
If you’ve done any research online, you’ve probably seen services like Squarespace, GoDaddy and Wix.
These services offer a low startup cost and are extremely affordable for small businesses with a very small budget.
What do I consider a very small budget? For the sake of this article, let’s say anything less than $500 a year or less than $50 a month.
So, if you’re a small business owner who has less than $500 to spend, you should probably try building your own website using a website builder.
A website builder can help small business get off the ground quickly by using a pre-designed template with content placeholders for images and text.
Although it’s a quick and easy solution for most, website builders have their pitfalls as well.
Most website builders look cheap and unprofessional. They’re built from cookie-cutter templates that provide limited functionality to the creator, eliminating the need to do any coding.
One of the biggest misconceptions about website design is that it’s easy and anyone can do it. Website builders make it easy to get online, but there’s more to web design than the aesthetics of a website.
Web design isn’t just about having a pretty looking website anymore; it’s about providing a visitor with the right information at the right time that helps solve their problem.
Hiring a professional web designer helps you create a website that will convey a clear, consistent and compelling message that represents your business. Your message should help establish the trust of your visitors by creating an emotional connection that provides a sense of security and credibility.
Not only will hiring a professional web designer save you time, they will also create a website that is unique, easy to use and will give your visitors confidence in your products and services.
Hiring a professional web designer with experience in search engine optimization (SEO) can help your website rank well with search engines, providing your business with an edge over your competition.
When it comes to building your website, whether you elect to do it yourself or hire it done, you should be thinking of your website as an investment, not a cost.
Website builders like Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy are attractive because they provide you with immediate savings upfront and fast turnaround times that deliver short-term results.
By looking past the attractive rate and thinking about your business long term, a web design professional can help you set goals, grow your business and take the robot out of your design.
At this point, the decision is yours to make. Do you save a couple bucks up front with a cookie-cutter template or do invest in a branded long-term solution unique to your business?
You’ve spent hours writing content for your website: blog posts, educational resources, information about your products and services. You’ve checked and double-checked your spelling and grammar and used all the right keywords.
But you’re still not getting leads. And now you can’t help but think:
What am I doing wrong?
Your content marketing is more than writing great, keyword-rich content—it’s a strategy. It requires analyzing not just your content, but your entire website and marketing funnel, to ensure that you generate the quality leads you want.
Let’s look at some of the most common mistakes business owners make that keep them from generating leads.
Content marketing that’s focused on making a sale often doesn’t do the job. Customers are more likely to buy from someone they trust, which is why it’s so important to create content that helps people or educates them on a topic. By offering resources without charging a cent, you not only built trust and goodwill to potential customers—you also position yourself as an expert in your field. And wouldn’t you much rather do business with an expert than a novice?
Your content should solve a common problem that your prospects have. If your content isn’t generating leads, take a closer look and see if your content answers a question or solves a problem that users type in search engines. If it doesn’t, it may be time for a rewrite.
Whoa, that sounds harsh, doesn’t it? But think about websites you’ve visited in the past month. What kind of content made you keep reading? Chances are it was well-written, compelling content that told a story and offered a fresh look at a topic. In order to be effective, your content needs to do the same.
There’s nothing wrong with covering some of the most important topics in your industry, but you have to do so with a new take or from a different perspective. If you can help people see a topic in a new light or show them something they may not already know, you’ll build your credibility as an expert—and encourage readers to come back to you for more fresh content.
Every piece of content you create should have a call to action. This lets readers know what they should do next. After all, you can’t generate leads from just content. You need to have a path and strategy in place to guide those readers into a funnel that turns them into leads.
If someone loves your content and you don’t give them a way to sign up for your email list or download more content, they won’t know how to move forward. Instead, they may never return to your site. That’s definitely not what you want.
Instead, make use of opt-in boxes or pop-ups that encourage readers to sign up to get the latest content. This is a quick and easy way to grow your email list and to ensure that you can stay in touch with people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
You can have the most amazing content in the world, and it will be useless if your website takes a long time to load. Did you know that users are more likely to leave a site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load on a desktop? That number gets even smaller on a mobile browser—just 3 seconds!
These days we all expect pages to load quickly when we go to a website. If your page is slow to load, or even if it has a few elements, such as images, that take a while to completely load, you’re likely losing potential prospects as a result.
Remember when we said that CTAs are important? They are! But too many calls to action can be confusing for users, and they may give up rather than try to decide what to do next. Too many options can lead to what’s known as analysis paralysis, which means that visitors will freeze and take no action at all.
Instead of offering a variety of actions your visitors can take after landing on your website, provide a clear path. Tell your users what you want them to do next and remove any other links or buttons that might distract from that goal.
These days your users are more likely to view your website on their phone than on a desktop. In fact, mobile traffic accounts for over half of all internet traffic. Ensuring that every page of your site is mobile-friendly is no longer optional—it’s a necessity.
Your website may look amazing on desktop, but things may be out of order or spaced weirdly on a phone or table. Make sure your site is functional and easy to use on any device. Otherwise, you may drive prospects away.
The images on your site should be as authentic and genuine as your content. Stock photos immediately suggest to visitors that you didn’t put in the time or effort to properly promote and represent your business. They look cheap and can even reduce the credibility your stellar content has built up with your visitors.
Instead of opting for generic images, take photos of your actual office, products and staff. If you can afford it, invest in a professional business or branding session that will provide you with high-quality images you can use to promote your company, both on your website and on social media.
Have you moved your office in the past few years? Did you update your online listings when you did? If not, previous customers and prospects may have trouble finding you. Failing to keep your listings updated can give users the impression that your business isn’t trustworthy and may lead them to reach out to another company to meet their needs.
Keep your NAPS (name, address, phone number and site) information up to date across all local listing pages and platforms. Doing so ensures that users can find you easily and without unnecessary frustration.
We get it, your website is a work in progress. You’re constantly updating and creating new pages, and even removing old ones. But multiple redirects can make it a challenge for search engines to index your site and can make your website feel less trustworthy to human visitors.
After you change a page URL or remove a page from your website, be sure to update any internal links. This way, you don’t have to create additional redirects that may confuse your visitors and search engines.
Anyone who visits your website should be able to quickly reach you, whether by phone, email or chat. If users can’t get quick answers to their questions, they’re more likely to visit another site where they can get those answers.
Make sure your visitors know how to reach you. Have a clickable phone number easily visible on your homepage, as well as your email address. Remember, if people can’t get in touch with you, they can’t do business with you.
If you’re feeling disheartened by this list, keep your chin up! All of these problems are fixable, and we can help you find the right solution for your SEO and marketing strategy. Let’s start with a free SEO Audit to diagnose the big problems with your site and get your business back on track!
You spent time building out your Facebook audiences and creating compelling ad copy. You’re getting plenty of clicks—but no conversions. How do you turn all that traffic into paying customers?
If you’re getting clicks but not conversions, there’s definitely a problem. But it’s a problem you can fix.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why your traffic may not be converting.
To get quality leads that you can convert into sales, you need a clear understanding of your audience: their demographics, interests and needs.
If you’re like most businesses, you’ve already sketched out your target audience. But most of this information is likely based on guesses. What you need to make sales is specific details about what each segment of your audience wants from your business and what they’re willing to pay for it.
Start by interviewing existing customers. Find out what drew them to your business and why they felt like your company was a good fit for their needs. What were their pain points? That is, what were they looking for when they started searching for a product or service like yours? How did you meet that need?
The more information you have about your potential customers, the more successful your marketing efforts will be.
Search engine algorithms are designed to understand a searcher’s intent and provide them with relevant search results. If your keywords don’t match the products and services you offer, you’re most likely attracting the wrong kind of people to your site.
In order for your traffic to convert into sales, it has to be the right kind of traffic; that is, potential buyers who are looking for what you offer.
If you’re attracting the wrong kind of traffic, you may need to rethink your keyword strategy and create new content that better lines up with your products or services. While this option will take time, it’s definitely worth the effort.
Imagine this: A user clicks on one of your ads and visits your website. They browse, look at your products and services and are interested in what you have to offer. But they don’t return and make a purchase.
Without nurturing your leads, you may find this scenario happening far too often.
Nurturing refers to helping your prospects move through your sales funnel, and it’s essential to transforming interested visitors into buyers. Remember that most people aren’t ready to buy after their first encounter with your business. That’s why it’s essential to nurture and develop a relationship with your prospects. People are more likely to buy from companies or other people they feel they can trust.
There are a variety of ways to nurture your leads, including email campaigns, social media and paid advertising. You will likely want to use different nurturing methods in different places in your funnel to get the best results.
Depending on how saturated your market is, it may take quite a bit of effort and strategy to create a compelling offer that encourages leads to convert. That doesn’t mean you need to rethink your entire business or change what you offer—it just means you need to do a better job of explaining how valuable your offering is.
Think about what makes you different from other companies in your industry. How is your offering unique? What can you provide clients that other businesses can’t? Once you figure out the answers to these questions, you can better market your services in a way that is compelling to clients and will encourage them to take that next step and purchase.
These are just a few reasons why your ad campaigns may be falling short in conversions. Fortunately, with a little extra thought and planning, you can develop a marketing strategy and sales funnel that works for you and turns those interested prospects into paying customers.
GrooveFunnels – Free Account for up to 3 funnels. Includes selling for order checkouts and upsell/downsell products. Also includes proof widgets to show people who recently purchased the product. GrooveFunnels is still in beta. It’s our builder of choice, especially if you upgrade to the Lifetime Account where you get all of the features including GrooveMail where you can send automated campaigns triggered by people filling out your forms, purchasing products, applying tags and adding contacts to lists. When you upgrade using out affiliate link, we are crediting you with the commission we make from your purchase as your referral to help support you 1-on-1 with personalize training, customizations and automating funnel(s). Sign up for a FREE Account using our affiliate link.
All niche templates available and ready to be installed in your account.
ClickFunnels – ($97/mo after 14-day trial) plan at $97/month. You will be limited to 20 funnels. This is going to be the most expensive option in the long run due to this being a monthly subscription you have to maintain, even when you are not using it.
All niche templates expected to be available by 10/16/2020.
Converdy – Only available during launches. We have an account with Converdy that we can add customers. This would require a monthly subscription where we charge to host your funnels.
No requests have been made for this at this time, so this builder is low on the priority list.
WordPress – We suggest adding a subdomain to your domain. Adding a subdomain will allow a clean install for your funnels and will avoid having to customize your pages in the future to remove the header and footer from your funnel pages.
Beaver Builder – All niche templates available and ready to be installed in your account.
Elementor – all niche templates expected to be available 10/16/2020.
Influencersoft – This is a new one we are checking out. $1 trial account with an upgrade to lifetime for $497. The software includes a visual funnel builder, drag ‘n’ drop page builder, email scheduler, sales pipeline, course catalog for students and more.
This is untested but seems like a viable option. Funnels should be available for this by the end of October 2020.
You’ve taken the time to think of a business name and are ready to take the first step to getting your business online, but don’t know where to start. You’ve come to the right place, this series with guide you through the 12 Steps to Building and Promoting a Website.
I’ll provide you with tips and resources that I’ve used and learned over the past 10 years working in web design and development industry. I’ll cover topics from choosing a name to the best marketing strategies, that will help you get the most out of your website and put you in the best position to succeed.
Let’s begin by Choosing a Domain Name.
After determining a name for your business, you’ll want to get a domain name. A domain name or web address is the address where you can be found online.
When selecting your domain name, I suggest you purchase a domain name that is similar to your business name. This will help with branding your business and making it easier for customers to find you.
For example, I purchased two domain names for my business: thehoppercompanyllc.com and thehopperco.com. I did this for two reasons, ease of use for my customers and visitors and to secure the legal name of my business.
The first thing I think of, in anything I do, is what’s going to be easiest for people trying to find my business. By doing this, I am creating a user-centric model that places users – visitors, customers, partners, etc. – at the center of my business.
Here are some important tips to keep in mind when selecting your domain name:
Nowadays, there are several different TDLs that can be perfectly suitable, but the most common is .com. If you are not sure of who to use for a domain name registrar, please take a look at our Toolkit & Recommendations page for suggestions.
If you would like help thinking of a domain name for your website, you should checkout the domain name suggestion tool called NameMesh.
After selecting your domain name, you should determine where you want to host your website by selecting a web host or web hosting service.
A web hosting service provider is a business that provides a service and the technology required to make a website available to be viewed on the internet. This is one of the most important steps in this process before building your website.
You will want to make sure your web hosting company is using SSDs (solid state drives) for faster website performance, can provide you with a free SSL (for shopping and better ranking in search engines) and can provide support 24/7.
In addition, here are a couple of other things to keep in mind when selecting your web hosting service:
You can learn more about them on our Toolkit & Recommendations page.
As a business owner wanting a website, you are faced with two options: build the website yourself or hire a professional to do it.
If you want to build the website yourself, you can use services like Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy, but I would highly recommend hiring a professional web designer to build it for you.
Hiring a professional website designer will:
Think of your website as an investment rather than an expense. You should see anything you put into your website as a value that you seek to get some type of return on, whether that is inbound leads or a monetary value.
When using a template from a website builder, you are limited to the design and functionality of that template, which is often a one-size-fits-all design, meant to cater to the masses, rather than an individual solution custom-developed around your businesses goals like a professionally-built site would be. Instead of limiting your website’s capabilities with a template, you should have your website custom built to help convert visitors into leads and leads into sales.
Once your website is complete, you can publish your site and make it “live” for everyone to see.
If you hired a web designer to create your website, they should move your files from a test server over to the “live” server. This is usually included in the price of the project.
Before going live, you’ll want to double-check all of your links, pages and content.
Once again, if you hired a professional to design your website, then this usually done by them. If something does wrong while transferring the site, your web designer should be able fix it.
Social networks are great for building credibility and getting people to help promote your business. By using social networks you can:
If you are planning on hiring or have hired a professional web designer to build your site, you can use the demographics of your target audience to help interact with people likely to buy from or engage with your brand.
Search engine optimization (SEO) can have a huge impact on the success of your business. SEO is defined as the process of generating traffic to your website using non-paid, organic search results.
I highly recommend hiring a professional to implement it. With more than 200 SEO ranking factors out there, it takes a lot of time and research to understand this ever-changing world and make sure that your site is properly optimized. As someone who has been in the SEO industry for more than 10 years, I’ve compiled a list of important SEO factors that we examine every client’s site against to help increase their search engines rankings.
When thinking about building your business and the value that can come from SEO, you should look at every dollar you spend as an investment that can produce a massive return.
Some benefits and reasons to hire an SEO expert to grow your business are:
After your website is complete, you should register your website with search engines. Submitting your website to search engines will help crawler find and index your site faster and more completely.
Register your site manually to avoid potential harm to your SEO ranks from free search engine submission tools. I recommend registering your site with the top search engines, Google and Bing.
Online mapping sites can be a great way to get your name out there. Online maps offer reviews, directions and contact information for people searching for your business or services you provide in the area.
You can also use Yext PowerListings to control your listings for Google, Yahoo, MapQuest and Yelp.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC), also known as Cost-Per-Click (CPC), is an advertising model on the internet in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads are clicked by a user.
PPC campaigns are great for driving traffic to your site for a special promotion or a sale you may be running. However, using PPC campaigns can be expensive, which is why I suggest hiring a professional; you can lose a lot of time and money if you don’t know what you are doing.
As I mentioned earlier, SEO is going to be a better investment for your business because the results are permanent and not temporary like PPC ads are.
As there are many other marketing avenues, you will have to determine what avenues are best for your business and audience. Some examples include:
Maintaining your website is not only important from a security standpoint, but also gives your customers a reason to come back.
Here are some more reasons why you should properly maintain your website:
Every website should have a way to measure and analyze traffic. By tracking visitor activity on your website, you can learn what content is of value on your website by monitoring page views, time spent on different pages, bounce rate, etc. Knowing how your customers are using your site tells you what is working, what isn’t working and what to do more or less of to ensure your customer is having the best experience possible to keep them coming back (as well as gaining new customers).
Our web analytics tool of choice is Google Analytics. With Google Analytics you will be able to:
You know what SEO is, but do you know how to implement best practices to ensure that Google and other search engines show your website in search results? It’s much easier said than done.
Here are four things all small businesses should know to include when working on improving their search engine optimization.
There’s a lot of unique terminology that comes with SEO, but it’s often not as complicated as it seems. Alt tags are simply descriptions for the images on your website. Since search engines can’t read images like they do with copy, alt tags allow your images to be translated in a language Google can understand.
Alt tags are especially important for small business service providers because it helps your images show up on Google searches for potential clients to see your work. Without alt tags, your images don’t exist to search engines, and you can miss out on possible leads and opportunities.
A backlink is exactly what it sounds like: a link on another website that leads back to your site. The important thing here is to create quality over quantity. You don’t want spammy sites to link to yours.
Think about all the people you’ve worked with, like other businesses or even publications. These are opportunities to create backlinks. When you create a blog post about a project, be sure to tag all the vendors or other contractors you worked with and ask them to do the same for you.
Another way to create backlinks is to be active on social media and interact with blogs and websites on which you want to be featured. Engage in discussions, share your information and knowledge, and drop links to your website when relevant. It’s important to do more than just drop a link because you don’t want to spam people. That’s definitely bad for business and people frown upon self-interests promotion and usually gets ignored.
You’ve heard it, and we’ve said it: content is king. No matter how cool your website is, if you don’t have quality content that people want to read, you’re not going to get the leads you want. Don’t post blogs just for the sake of blogs—create educational and highly readable content that informs and entertains.
Blog posts aren’t just a way to show off your projects and add more SEO keywords—they’re a way to introduce prospects to you and give them an idea of your personality and skillset.
Want to learn more about content? Check out 5 Things Every Small Business Should Know About Content Marketing.
Your homepage is, of course, the most visited page on your website, so it has to not only make a great first impression, but keep visitors intrigued enough to check out different pages on your site.
It’s essential to include your main keywords in your homepage title and throughout the content on the page to help you move up in search engine rankings. Know what keywords you want to rank for and be sure they’re on your homepage, but don’t overdo it, or your content will be more spammy and less quality.
While this is just the beginning of what you need to do to optimize your website and content for SEO, it’s a great start getting your site on track to move up in search engine rankings and get more results.
Optimizing for SEO takes time and thought, and it can feel like an overwhelming amount of work, especially when you have a full schedule and other facets to deal within your business.
But what if you could improve your SEO without lifting a finger?
That’s where we come in: a full-service, done-for-you SEO and getting you to the first page of Google results for your chosen keywords.
Why not leave the SEO to the experts?
Just like your car, your website requires regular check-ups and maintenance to ensure everything is running smoothly. After all, you don’t want minor issues like technical errors keeping your from reaching your target audience and generating leads.
A regular SEO audit allows you to diagnose technical issues that you can fix to improve both your website’s optimization and user experience. Once you are aware of these issues, you can develop a strategy to fix these errors.
An audit also discovers performance errors on your site. Issues like page speed and title length can have a negative impact on your website’s performance and cause users to leave your site without taking the action you want them to take.
With a comprehensive SEO audit, you can find not only technical and performance issues, but review your keywords and content to see where you can improve.
With our free online audit tool, you can quickly and easily find issues that are slowing your site down and keeping you from boosting your rankings.
Get a comprehensive SEO Audit Report that pinpoints which aspects of your site are working well and which require immediate attention.