Content can support you with a variety of goals. The key is knowing what type of content can help with which goals, so you can be more intentional and strategic about what you create and share.

Sounds good?

Then let’s take a look at your business goals for 2023 and at the type of content you want to create to achieve those goals.

1. Growing your audience/email list

The more you become ‘known’ in your industry, the more customers you’ll attract. It’s that simple.

But even though social media is great and everything, nothing quite beats growing your email list. Having your potential customers’ emails means you can speak to them directly, whenever you want, with little distraction. It’s a powerful tool.

We know this ourselves because we’ve personally managed to grow our business on a tiny marketing budget. All we did was publish the right kinda blogs, convert readers into email subscribers, and, when we’ve built enough trust, sold them our content writing services.

Unfortunately, a lot of small businesses struggle to build a sizeable email list. In a study of over 1000 small business owners by Andrew and Pete at ATOMIC, they found that over half of respondents have an email list of 0-51 people 😬

When you don’t have your own audience, i.e. a list of people you can communicate directly with, you’re reliant on ads (which are pricey), referrals (which are inconsistent) or social media (which can be unreliable).

So how can the content you publish on your website help you grow your audience and your email list?

You can grow your audience by producing more SEO content.

What is SEO content?

SEO content is what you create in direct response to your customers’ internet search queries. It’s in-depth, well-written, engaging content that’s both informative and educational.

And it’s also optimised content, meaning that is written in a way that helps your content pop up in the search results.

The benefits of SEO content

The main focus of SEO content is to help you rank on the first page of Google so that more of your prospective customers can find you.

Being in the search results on the first page is the ultimate aim here because, unfortunately (and you know this as a user yourself), people hardly ever click on the second page or beyond. In fact, according to research, only 0.63% of all Google searchers do!

So for your website to show up higher in the ranking, you need to create SEO content regularly and consistently and always optimise it for search.

This means you need to:

• Research keywords on topics that are relevant to your industry and that are sought-after by your ideal customers (i.e. what are people searching for?)
• Make sure that those keywords are organically (i.e. naturally) included in your content in strategic places (for example, the title, the sub-headings, the description of the images, etc.) You want your content to read well – not sound like it was created by a robot!
• Make sure your content includes both internal and external links to other helpful and related content (just like we’re doing in the next line).

Related content: WordPress SEO For Blogging – How to Optimise Your WordPress Blog Posts.

Examples of SEO content

A simple way of understanding SEO content is by thinking about some of your own web searches. What do you typically search on the internet? Often, we’re after information or tutorials (‘How To’ type of content), such as “How to complete your tax return” or “Best pet-friendly cafes in Liverpool.”

Here are some examples of SEO content on our website:

7 Ways To Write An Irresistible Blog Post Headline.
What is an SEO content writing service? And how does it all work?

What makes for ‘bad’ SEO content?

Having SEO content on your website is a must. But we see a lot of business owners not quite hitting the mark with this.

Yes, your aim is to rank on the first page of the search engine results, which means the SEO content you produce must be driven by the type of searches your ideal customers type into Google. And you can use the internet and other more specialised SEO tools to decide what topics you should create content around.

But that doesn’t mean your content needs to be boring. Or that it needs to be the same as everyone else.

Quite the opposite, in fact!

You want to make sure your voice, personality, and your individual experience and expertise shine in your content. You’re creating educational and informative content, but you need to be doing this as you.

Because that also gives you a chance to highlight how you’re different and to start creating the brand awareness people need to decide to go ahead and buy from you.

Related content: How to use humour in your marketing, so people fall in love with your business (+11 prompts to help you!)

2. Increasing brand awareness

If your goal is to increase brand awareness with your content, you need to create thought-leadership content.

This is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but is an essential part of content marketing. With so much content out there, the only way to stand out is to create that positions you as the leader in your industry.

You can increase brand awareness by creating thought leadership content

What is thought-leadership content?

Thought-leadership content uses your expertise, insight, and experience to help you become the go-to source of information in your industry.

Rather than a specific type of content, we like to think of thought-leadership content as an approach to content creation. It can be about expressing controversial or outspoken opinions if you want it to be. But it doesn’t have to be.

It’s definitely not about picking fights with people! It’s more about not sitting on the sidelines and letting your audience know what you think about certain topics. We’d like you to see it as content that’s authentically and recognisably you, with a strong brand voice.

So thought-leadership content will typically include:

• Stong and/or controversial opinions
• Evidence of new findings within your industry based on your experience
• A desire to share your knowledge without any limitations – i.e. showing us the why and the how!
• Original research conducted by you and your business and your findings
• A strong voice or different approach to whatever it is you do.

The benefits of thought-leadership content

The main benefit of sharing thought-leadership content is to help you build credibility as a business and be seen as an expert. That’s a sure way to strengthen brand awareness with your prospective customers and clients.

Examples of thought-leadership content

Thought-leadership content can cover the following topics:

• Original research
• Business decisions you’ve made and why you’ve made them
• Expert interviews with others in your industry
• Customer client stories and case studies – ones that show the exact steps you took to overcome a problem with lots of evidence and value. Not just saying nice things about yourself
• Insider looks into your business that is actually helpful for your target audience e.g. publishing your income and expenditure every month and breaking down how you made sales that month (we always love these articles when we see them!)

Here’s an example you might recognise from our website:

How to market your business during a recession: 20 industry experts give us their views

What makes for ‘bad’ thought-leadership content?

Thought-leadership content is almost always a good idea unless you’re trying to be controversial for the sake of being controversial. Remember you’re not trying to pick an argument here!

There’s a difference between saying what you think and firmly drawing lines in the sand and explaining why you believe what you believe and trying to pick a fight with your prospective clients or competitors.

Be mindful of the difference!

Thought-leadership content will typically attract the people who are right for you and your business and ‘repel’ the ones who aren’t. But it doesn’t mean that you have to offend people or burn bridges in the process. There’s no need to criticise a competitor or expose a client, for example. You can express your opinions with objectivity and balance while also being kind to others!

Related content: SEO Content vs Thought Leadership Content: which should you create for your business?

3. Converting more leads

Another goal you might have in 2023 (and you should have this goal all year round every single year!) is to convert more leads. This goal is just (if not more important) than the first goal of growing your audience or email list. Because yes, it’s great doing that, but a large email list doesn’t pay the bills, you’ve still got to convert those subscribers into paying customers.

And that’s something businesses often neglect!

So what type of content can help you convert more?

You can increase conversions by creating sales-enablement content.

What is sales-enablement content?

As it says on the tin, sales-enablement content is what you produce throughout the selling process to engage with your prospects and directly address their concerns.

It shouldn’t just talk up your products or services, but it should also tackle the ‘objections’ your prospective customers have towards working with you. Whether they vocalise them or not, it’s your job to identify them, break them down, and explain (step-by-step) either why they’re not applicable or how are you planning to address them through your work.

For example, if you offer online fitness coaching, someone might think the service isn’t for them because they think they won’t be able to keep themselves accountable unless they have their coach physically in the gym with them. So how do you address that? How can you show them, through your content, that your service can actually help them and solve the problem they’re experiencing right now?

The benefits of sales-enablement content

Sales-enablement content help you gently guide your prospective customers towards making the informed decision to buying from you.

It’s not about being pushy or ‘salesy’ here. You’re not trying to convince just anyone to buy. You’re explaining to the people who are right for you what you can do for them and how, so they can feel reassured and confident in thinking you’re the right choice for them.

Examples of sales-enablement content

Sales-enablement content can include:

• Case studies from clients
• Objection-led content – problems with your industry, products or services, why you’re priced differently, why you don’t do something that others in your industry do etc
• “How to find the right…” type of content, such as “How to find the right Virtual Assistant for your accountancy business.”
• Buyer’s guides
• Use cases
• Content that breaks down the process of working with you
• FAQ style content

Some examples you can find on our website are:

What is our Black Friday offer all about then?
Why is our SEO content writing & blog management service so expensive?
Biggest Problems with SEO Companies (and how you can avoid them!)
SEO Content Writer vs SEO Agency: Which One is Best for Your Business?

What makes for ‘bad’ sales-enablement content?

When creating sales-enablement content, you don’t want to be overly promotional. But there’s an easy way around this – think about your customers and what they need. Put yourself in their shoes:

What are they worried about?
What’s holding them back from going ahead and working with you? Is it money? Lack of time? Lack of self-confidence? Something else?
And what fears or doubts might they be experiencing right now?

Spend some time thinking about these questions (or even better, ask your prospective customers directly, if you can) and address them in your content. This will allow you to create sales-enablement content that does its job of helping you convert leads into sales while also being helpful and not pushy.

Related content: How to increase your sales using objection-led content and How to Make Content Part of Your Sales Process (so you get more sales, faster!)

4. Retaining more customers

The last goal you might have (and one that completes the sales cycle quite nicely) is retaining customers.

You’ve done all the work to attract people into your world, wow them into becoming your customers, and now you want them to be loyal and stay. You want them to be so happy with the results they get from working with you that they buy from you again and again.

You can retain customers by producing customer service content

What is customer service content?

This is content that helps your audience achieve their goals by using your product or being part of your service.

Remember you’re addressing your customers now – not just leads and prospects. These people have already bought your product or service – they already know you’re brilliant!

But they still have questions about how to use your product or what to do next. So think about what type of content you can create that helps you serve your existing customers.

Ultimately, your aim with this content is to make your current customers reach their goals faster and more efficiently – which is good for both you and your customer!

The benefits of customer service content

The good thing about sharing customer service content is that it helps both you and your customers. How?

For one, it saves you time in answering questions. If one customer has a question about how to use your product or service, chances are that others will too. So answer these questions at scale and through your content – you do it once, and you don’t have to keep repeating yourself.

And when it comes to your current customers, it keeps them super happy. Have you ever been in a position yourself where you’re not sure about asking a question about a product or service you bought? You may feel embarrassed or think it’s a silly question. But if the business owner has already pre-emptied and answered that question, you don’t even have to put your hand up and ask!

One of our SEO content writing clients recently told us that their customer service team shares our content with customers every single day, and it has saved them hours every week in admin time! 

Isn’t that brilliant when you can just find all the information you need? That’s exactly what customer service content can do for you.

Examples of customer service content

An example of customer service content we wrote back when we were web designers is How To Write Your Website About Page.

We used to create the design and graphics for our website design clients, but they’d need to write their own copy. So we served them with content that helped them make the most of the service they were buying from us.

Another example we think is brilliant is this blog post from ScoreApp – 29 Simple Ways to Launch Your Quiz Lead Magnet.

Once you’ve set up your quiz, ScoreApp also produces content that helps you launch it, so you can take the next step. That’s customer service for you!

What makes for ‘bad’ customer service content?

The only thing that makes customer service content ‘bad’ is the lack of it! We don’t see many businesses regularly producing this type of content. And ‘product updates’ don’t quite count, especially if they sound technical and boring. This isn’t customer service.

Customer service content still needs to be helpful, engaging, informative, educational, and in your own voice. The only difference from the other types of content we talked about is that it’s aimed at your existing customers rather than your prospects.

You’ll often find that customer service content is all helpful for non-customers too. They’ll find it, learn more about you and your business and become a lead. So there are no excuses!

Would you like our help to achieve your business goals for 2023?

In this blog post, we discussed four different types of goals. You may have decided to focus on one or two as priorities for 2023 or you may want to work towards all four. There’s no right or wrong answer here.

But whatever your goals, content marketing can play a big part in helping you achieve your objectives, as long as you produce content that aligns with your goals. If that sounds overwhelming and like too much work for the time you have available, we can help!

Our Blog Writing and SEO Agency is the ultimate time-saving solution for ambitious and time-poor businesses. So if you’d like us to help you research and write your content for you, get in touch!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post What content do you need to create to hit your business goals in 2023? appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Is this what you should focus on in your business right now?

Will it actually work?

Should you redesign your website first? 

Should you have brand guidelines? 

Should you wait until you’ve introduced another product or service you’re planning on introducing?

It’s all a bit confusing right? Well in this article, we’re going to tell you exactly what you do and don’t need in place before you invest in an SEO content writer. 

What is an SEO Content Writer anyway?

First thing first, what even is one of those, right?

An SEO content writer is someone who produces compelling content in your tone of voice and style that is so engaging that it gets your readers to take action.

That’s the ‘Content Writer’ bit of the title.

So what’s the ‘SEO’ bit all about, then?

The ‘SEO’ bit means that a content writer typically has a deep understanding of SEO. They won’t just write any old content, but they’ll also optimise it for the keywords you want to rank for. And they’ll do it in a way that sounds natural and not robotic – a way your readers will love. 

Makes sense?

This last bit is important. Because if you’re thinking about this service right now, it’s because you want your content to attract more traffic to your website and perform better in the search engine rankings.

But your readers still need to be at the heart of it all. And if you end up with blog posts that read like they’ve been written by a robot, you need to fire that SEO Content Writer – pronto! But a good one will make sure all your content is informative, engaging, and useful to your audience.

Related content: What is an SEO content writing service? And how does it all work?

So now that we got that out of the way, why are we writing a whole article about what you need to have in place before you can hire your very own SEO Content Writer? After all, we offer an SEO content writing service, don’t we just want to work with anyone and everyone?

Short answer, no. 

Long answer! We want to make sure we offer the right service for your needs right now so you can make a decent ROI out of hiring us. Otherwise, you’d be unhappy and feel like you’re wasting your precious time and hard-earned money. And that would make us sad too. Which is not a good outcome for anyone, right?

So let’s look at what you don’t need first.

A quick overview of what you do and don’t need before you hire an SEO Content Writer 

Things you DON’T need before you hire an SEO Content Writer

1. A fancy-pants, expensive website

You might think it’s a bit odd that expert web designers are sitting here (with a straight face) telling you that you don’t need a fancy-pants website to make your content work.

But it’s true.

This might sound like news to you, but websites are never forever. As your business evolves – and your products and services change with it – your website needs to change too. That means that during the lifespan of your business, you may go through a lot of different websites or re-designs. Does that mean that you can’t have any content on your website right now because you might be changing your services one or two years down the line?

Absolutely not!

If you have content on your website and decide to update it or start again with a different one, you can always transfer any blog posts you’ve already published onto your new site.

So let’s not use the fact that your business (and website) is still evolving as an excuse not to create any content. You’d be missing out on business and leaving A LOT of money on the table.

Related content: Why You Shouldn’t Redesign Your Website (And When You Should).

A caveat: what if you have an old-fashioned website (that looks BAD)

So you don’t need a fancy-pants website, but once you decide to invest in epic content for your website (i.e. the type of content we write for you), your content will start to bring more traffic to your website (yay!) and also increase your rankings in the search engines (get in!). 

So surely, when your prospective leads and customers land on your website, you want them to see something that looks good, right? But more on that in a minute…

What you definitely DON’T want is something that looks like it was designed 30 years ago when people still used MS-DOS and computer listing paper (if that’s before your time, look it up – it’ll be a laugh).

Now, that kind of outdated stuff would put your readers right off. They’d be clicking the back button faster than you can say “Hey!” and never actually get to consume the amazing content you’ve paid us to create for you.

We don’t want that either.

2. Brand guidelines

We hear this a lot from prospective clients: “We don’t have brand guidelines, so we can’t work with you yet.”

Technically, that’s not true. You definitely CAN work with us. Sure, brand guidelines are nice for you (and for us) to have. It means you’ve already done the groundwork to figure out how you can use imagery, text, and design elements together to represent your unique brand and show up consistently on different platforms and mediums. 

It also means you’ll have done the work on your ‘tone of voice’ and how you want to ‘sound’ to your customers. And yes, having that understanding would help us create content that fits with the rest of your brand.

But it’s not essential.

Why?

Because we can figure all that out together. During our kick-off call, we can tease out your tone of voice and fine-tune it as we go. You’ll give us feedback, we’ll take it onboard, and ensure that any content we write for you sounds exactly like you would.

It’s not Black Magic, promise. It’s what we do, and it’s based on cooperation and collaboration with you.

Related content: How to Nail Your Brand Tone of Voice for Your Business [With Examples].

3. Everything to ‘be perfect’ 

We see this all the time. And it makes us oh-so-sad.

A lot of website owners put off content creation (sometimes even indefinitely!) because they want everything to ‘be perfect’.

So they wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

But the right time never comes because, as we pointed out earlier, your business is always evolving and changing. So things are never going to ‘be perfect’. There’s no such thing. Sure, they might be perfect for RIGHT NOW. But 12-18 months down the line, they might not.

So don’t wait.

Because you’ll forever want to make changes and tweaks – to your business, your products and services, your packages, your website, and even your content. And that’s fine.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t capitalise on what you have right now. So create content around your existing products and services (the ones that your prospective customers can buy today), and you’ll attract more traffic to your website, show up higher in the search engine rankings, and get more leads and sales in your business. And that’s more dinero in your bank account, thank you very much.

Right. So that was all the stuff you DON’T need. But what is it that you DO need if you’re getting ready to hire an SEO Content Writer to write for you?

Things you need before you hire an SEO Content Writer 

1. A professional-looking website

It may sound like we’re contradicting ourselves here.

But we’re not.

We told you that you don’t need to spend thousands on a professionally-designed website or hire a super fancy web agency to create your business website. And it’s true. But you do need a professional-looking website.

Note: That does NOT mean expensive!

This may sound a bit vague and subjective, but you’ll know what the opposite of that is – boring, dull, full of stock photos of people in suits and offices, and something that looks like it was designed in the wrong decade.

You don’t want that.

You want something fresh with colours, fonts, and photographs that reflect you, your business, and your personality. Your copy has to explain exactly what it is you do, it has to be easy for your user to find where they need to go, and your images should be good quality. 

Nope, it does not need to be a 50K website designed by some high-end agency, but equally, it shouldn’t have had its last redesign in 2007! There’s a fine balance between the two, but we find the majority of people who get in touch do hit the mark with their websites.

2. A website that ‘technically’ works well

You don’t want any major technical issues with your website, as this can hinder your search engine rankings and annoy your website visitor.

Before we start working with you, we run an audit to check that your website is in good condition for Google. If it isn’t, don’t worry, we can work with you to fix it!

Some things to make sure you tick off are:

• Your website is mobile-friendly

You know how it works – most people check websites on the move on their smartphones, so you need a website that looks good on mobile as well as on desktop.

• Your website loads relatively fast

Again, you know that Internet users have little time and patience. We want things, and we want them now. If a website takes ages to load, we probably think it’s spam, or that it’s down, and it’s just not worth our time. So we’ll move on to the next thing and forget about going back again. That’s a lost lead or customer. And you definitely don’t want that.

• Your website is user-friendly

Our websites are about our businesses, yes, but they need to work for our audience as much as they do for us as business owners. Is the information easy to find? Is your website easy to navigate? Or are people getting lost? Are their burning questions being answered? Are your blog posts designed and structured in a way that makes it easy for your readers to skim-read them and get the information they want as quickly as possible?

This is what it means to have a professional-looking website. But it doesn’t mean you have to hire an agency to create it for you.

Related content: The Ultimate Guide to the Perfect Website and How much does it cost to build your WordPress website?

3. Knowing exactly what you’re selling and to who 

Your content should always point to what you’re selling, so we need you to be crystal clear about the products and services you offer and how you package them.

Do you offer monthly packages? Recurring fees? Do you sell a bespoke service, or is it a one-size-fits-all offering? Do you sell different packages at a range of prices? Who’s your ideal customer? Do you have a niche?

We create content with the aim of getting you more leads and sales, so it’s important we know what you want us to promote and talk about because, obviously, depending on what you offer, the content will vary.

Also, depending on who you’re talking to, the way we approach your blog posts and the language and tone we use will be different. Do you know what problems your customers are experiencing? Do you know how to talk about those problems and how your products or services are the perfect solutions for those struggles?

If you’re not yet super clear on this then you’re not ready to invest in content. But don’t worry, this is usually something you can work through quickly!

Related content: 11 Reasons our SEO content writing service is not right for you.

4. A lead magnet

And finally, this isn’t a must, but having a lead magnet is definitely helpful if you want to increase your audience. A lead magnet is usually something you give away for free in exchange for your web visitors’ email addresses.

A lot of lead magnets are handy ‘How to’ guides that help your audience solve a particular problem you’re an expert in. But they don’t have to be. You could also use content upgrades (these tend to be pieces of additional content that people can sign up for from within a blog post) or even a quiz. We have one, and it’s called The SEO Quiz.

There are several types of lead magnets you can offer on your website. But if you don’t have one just yet, don’t worry! We can definitely help you create something amazing that works for you and your business.

Related content: The Ultimate Guide to Generating More Leads From Your Website.

So this is it. That’s exactly what you need to have (or not have) in place if you’re thinking of hiring us as your SEO Content Writers.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post What you do (and don’t) need to have in place before you hire an SEO Content Writer appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

What is a MASSIVE investment for one business, might be a drop in the ocean for another.

Some of you might already know what we charge and think that we are really cheap. Given all the different elements that are included in our service (including planning, writing, publishing and optimising the content). After all, if you were to hire multiple different freelancers or agencies to do all of the jobs that our service encompasses then you could easily be paying double or more every month.

But recently, we’ve also had people who are interested in working with us ask: “why are you so expensive?”

And it’s a totally fair question!

Especially if you’re ready to hire someone to help drive organic traffic to your website, and you’re wondering why our SEO content writing & blog management service is more expensive than hiring a freelance SEO writer.

But regardless of which camp you fall into, we want to make sure you make the right buying decision. 

While we think that there is loads of value bundled up into our SEO content writing & blog management service, you need to know what you are getting for the cost before you sign up.

So, in this blog, we’ll explore why we are so expensive, what our service includes, and how we differ from other services available.

Before we get into it, if you’re not quite sure what SEO content writing is, you can check out our article on what is an SEO content writing service?

How much do we charge for our SEO Content Writing and Blog Management service?

Don’t you hate when you can’t find the prices online when you want to buy something?

That’s why we’re pretty upfront about what we charge. No need to book an hour-long call with us just to find out the price!

So let’s just dive straight into our pricing. Then you’ll know exactly how much we charge (and whether that’s expensive for you).

The prices for our SEO content writing & blog management service start at £1297 per month and go up to £2297 per month. The smallest package (£1297) gets you up to 3000 words a month, which is usually split between two blog posts. And the largest package gets you 6000 words a month, which is often split between four blog posts.

The total cost that you pay depends on how many blogs you want us to publish every month. Everything else in the package remains the same. So regardless of whether you go for our silver or platinum package, you’ll get the same level of support from us (just a different number of blogs).

If at this point you are thinking: “Ah, that’s incredibly expensive”, then please do us a favour and keep on reading🙏.

By the end of the blog, you might decide that it’s still too expensive for your business. And that’s totally fine, we might still be able to work with you in a different way. But you also might realise that it’s such a valuable service, with loads packed in. It’s more than just writing content, hence why we charge what we do.

If you are thinking: “Lyndsay, that sounds like an amazing price, how can I sign up right away.” Then you can find out more here. But also we still recommend reading, as we promise it will get you even more excited about working with us.

Content writer vs SEO content writing & blog management service: which is more expensive?

We write content! So it’s totally understandable that we get compared to content writers when it comes to cost.

And in all honesty, we are usually more expensive than a freelance content writer.

So, let’s dig into why that is…

There are a couple of different pricing structures commonly used by freelance writers.

The first one is per word, with writers charging between $0.02 and $2.00 per word on average. If an average blog is 1000 words, this would work out at around £20 to £2000 per blog (a HUGE difference). However, this type of pricing often promotes word stuffing – more words written = a higher cost. But a blog should be as long as it needs to be, so we think it’s better to get a set price per blog. And luckily, this is the most common way for freelance content writers to price

The average cost per blog is between £200 and £700. The exact cost will depend on the individual writer’s skills and experience. The more blogs you want to be written every month, the more you will pay.

Let’s say a content writer is charging £300/per blog, for two blogs you will be paying £600 per month.

If you compare this to our Silver package (two blogs per month) you pay £1297 per month or £648.50/blog. So over double what you would pay the £300 per blog content writer.

But when you see what you else you are getting for your money you’ll understand why we price this way.

Why are we more expensive than content writers?

So, if we’re both writing content, then why do we charge more than most content writers for our content services?

I mean, obviously, it’s because we want to fund our lavish lifestyle and make all our neighbours jealous with multiple Lamborghinis in the driveway, right? Just kidding 😉

It really comes down to two things: services and skills.

What does an SEO content writer service include?

Traditionally a content writer primarily sticks to writing content (I know it’s in the name). They focus on creating blog content that educates and informs your potential clients while ranking highly on search engine results pages (SERPs).

In order to do this successfully, content writers will be skilled in SEO and optimising content. However, they usually work off a supplied content plan and are not involved in the planning or strategy aspect. They’ll also provide the blog via Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or something similar and won’t usually upload the content to your website or promote it in any way across your platforms.

Of course, the skills of each content writer will differ massively, but a freelancer by definition is one person. So you are very much restricted by the skills that they personally have.

What does our SEO Content Writing and Blog Management service include?

In comparison, our SEO content writing & content management service covers a whole range of content services within the one package.

That’s because we know that good content is just one part of driving organic traffic to your website. In addition to content, it includes:

• A discovery call (to get to know your business)
• In-depth keyword research (this takes us a LONG time, and we charge £997+VAT to do this as a stand-alone service)
• Competitor analysis
• Content strategy (i.e. telling you the exact articles you should create to rank on search and convert)
• A website audit, where we look at what could prevent or limit you from ranking
• A professional proofreader to look over the content (who we hire separately)
• Adding the content to your website and formating it
• Creation of the blog post featured image
• Extra ‘in-the body’ images that are optimised for search engines
• Optimise the content
• Publish the content

All of this is in addition to the writing. So yes, you could hire an SEO content writer, but that would mean you’d have to do all of the above yourself. Which is not a bad thing, by the way. It just requires more of your time.

Plus, we can also create social and email marketing copy for an extra cost to amplify the impact of your content.

Taking all of the above into account, suddenly £648.50/per month per blog doesn’t seem all that expensive right? Hiring individual freelancers for all of these roles would cost you A LOT more. You’d need to hire an SEO agency, graphic designer and web specialist or tech VA for those roles. That’s a lot!

SEO and Web Specialist Meets Expert Writer

Plus with Jammy Digital there are two of us, so you get to take advantage of our individual skills (plus we use a professional proofreading service to make sure there are no mistakes).

Although we both love creating content we have two different skill sets that enable us to offer a wider range of services than your average freelance content writer.

I (Lyndsay) am the content & SEO strategist and writer. I create blog posts in your style and tone of voice and optimise them for ranking on search engines.

Martin is a website and SEO strategist and graphic designer. He develops content strategies around topics that will rank, as well as uploading, optimising the content, and making it look beautiful. He was also a website designer for over a decade and can spot issues with your website that will prevent or limit your rankings. Your website has a huge impact on the success of your content, so it’s handy having Martin in your corner!

So, not only do we offer a lot more in terms of service, but we also have a wider range of skills that your blogs can benefit from.

SEO agency vs SEO & blog management service: which is more expensive?

In addition to content writers, we’re also often compared to SEO agencies. It makes sense, as we both aim to get you ranking on search engines via organic traffic.

But, whilst our goal is the same, the strategy we use to get you there differs quite dramatically. And as a result, so does the cost.

SEO agencies can charge anywhere between £2000 – £6000 per month, depending on what services you require.

However, as we talked about in our blog on SEO agency problems, this price doesn’t always include content creation (especially if you opt for a cheaper SEO package). In fact, our research showed that 13 out of 20 UK SEO agencies offered content marketing as a separate service to their SEO services.

Out of the 20 agencies we looked at, only one provided a price, which was £2899 per month. This included a blogging strategy and content calendar but there was no mention of creating content. So it’s likely that you will need to DIY your content or pay the SEO agency more to write the blogs.

In comparison, our content services range from £1297 per month (two blogs) to £2297 per month (four blogs). Even our top-end platinum package is at the lower end of SEO agency pricing.

Of course, the service that we offer in comparison to an SEO agency is very different.

Related content: SEO content writer vs SEO agency: which one is best for your business?

Generally speaking, we are LESS expensive than SEO agencies.

Why are we less expensive than hiring an SEO agency?

So, why are we less expensive than hiring an SEO agency?

Suddenly even our Platinum package at £2297/month seems like a bit of a bargain in comparison to the £6000/month you could be paying an SEO agency.

Does that mean an SEO agency gets better results?

A good SEO agency will be highly skilled at driving organic traffic to your website. They’ll dive into the technical aspects of SEO that will affect website performance and rankings.

However, some of them won’t flag problems with the user experience or design of your website (that’s not in their ‘remit’).

They will potentially create content that helps you rank (although sometimes they outsource this). But often won’t create content designed for conversions. This could result in more eyeballs on your website, but not an increase in sales.

While there are many great SEO agencies out there, we’ve found that some rely on the fact that no one really knows what they do. SEO is a bit of a dark art, and many SEO agencies have a magical wizardry surcharge.

In comparison, we know that technical SEO wizardry alone is not enough. And we used to run an SEO agency, so you could say that we are pretty clued up on all things SEO.

Rich content is a crucial part of driving traffic to your site, so we focus on creating content around a keyword strategy that helps you rank on search engines. Of course, we’ll let you know if there are any major issues with your website that is blocking traffic.

Whether an SEO agency or a content service is right for you will depend on the specific problems you are having. But, for most businesses looking to drive organic traffic, and more leads, focussing on SEO optimised content is hugely beneficial and more affordable than hiring an SEO agency.

Related content: The biggest problems with SEO companies (and how to avoid them).

Need help with your SEO content writing & blog management?

If by this point you are thinking that our price isn’t really that expensive for all that we offer, then our blog management service might be perfect for you.

We’re generally more expensive than content writers, but less expensive than SEO agencies. This is because our combined skills and subsequent service offer a little more than is usually offered by a content writer. And while we do a lot of SEO tasks, we don’t dive into the technical stuff quite as much as an SEO agency.

You could say it’s a mid-point between SEO content writers and SEO agencies, and our prices reflect that.

If your business wants to drive more traffic, leads and sales by creating epic content, then the SEO & blog management service will help you do just that. Plus, the whole process will be managed by us so you can put your time to better use.

Want to see where you’re at with SEO?

Struggling with SEO? Or just want to see where you’re performing right now? Then take our 2 minute SEO quiz and get a personalised report, telling you exactly how to improve.

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post Why is our SEO content writing & blog management service so expensive? appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

But it really is a question you should consider. Because a lot of people go straight into hiring an SEO agency when potentially, a good SEO content writer could get them great results at a more affordable price💰.

So, do you need a full SEO package with a fancy SEO agency?

Or, is an SEO content writer going to help you build authority, trust and rankings?

Traditionally SEO has meant tinkering with backlinks, on-page SEO and all the techy bits like site speed. But, with the modern-day Google algorithm, content is equally (if not more) important when it comes to winning the ranking war.

That’s why, in this blog, we’re going to explore the differences between SEO content writers and SEO agencies, to figure out which one is best for your business.

Related content: What is an SEO content writing service? And how does it all work?

SEO Content Writer vs SEO Agency: What is the difference between the two?

In order to figure out whether a content writer or agency is going to suit your business best, you need to understand the differences between them.

1. What’s the difference in cost?
2. What does their service include?
3. What results do they get you?
4. What’s the difference in skillset?
5. How do they work?

So, let’s look further into these to help you decide which one is right for your business

1. SEO Content Writer vs SEO Agency: What is the difference in cost?

One of the most important decisions for a business (especially in the current climate) is COST💰.

How much money are you going to need to budget every month?

And the cost between an SEO content writer and an SEO agency can vary quite substantially.

How much does an SEO content writer charge?

The 2021 ProCopywriters survey showed that the average daily rate for a copywriter is £387. Yes, content writers and copywriters are arguably different professions. However there is a lot of crossover between skillset and writers, so it’s worth using it as a benchmark for costs.

An SEO content writer usually charges anywhere between £200 and £700+ per blog article (yes, it’s a pretty wide range). But the exact cost will usually depend on the individual writer’s skills, experience, and exactly what services they offer.*

This might sound expensive, but content writing and SEO are highly skilled and time-consuming work. Once you factor in keyword research, competitor research, writing, proofreading, and optimising you are looking at around 6-10 hours per blog.

Plus you are paying for the experience and expertise of an SEO content writer that will enable your website to rank highly on search engines.

Most SEO content writers charge per blog, so exactly how much it will cost you will depend on how many blogs you want to publish per month.

Some SEO content writers may also charge per word (although this is less common). This could be anywhere from $0.02 per word, to $2.00 per word.

How much does an SEO agency charge?

In comparison, SEO agencies charge monthly and this usually starts at around £1000 per month all the way up to £10,000+ per month. And it’s worth noting that they are usually a little less flexible as they usually have six-month minimum contracts.

According to this research by AHREFS, SEO agencies charge an average of $2,819.87 per month for SEO. It’s unclear if this charge includes content writing and how much content writing that would be. From our own research looking at SEO agencies in the UK, 13 out of 20 SEO agencies we looked at offered content marketing as a separate service to their other SEO services.

As we talked about in our blog on SEO agency problems, the monthly cost doesn’t always include content creation (especially if you opt for a cheaper SEO package).

So you’ll either have to do that yourself or pay more to the SEO company to do this for you. If you want this included then it’s likely that you will be looking at the higher end of this monthly budget.

Out of twenty SEO agencies we looked at, only one provided a price. They had three packages. Their middle package is £2899 per month and includes a blogging strategy and content calendar but nowhere did it say they would create content on your behalf in this package.

Obviously, an SEO Content writer and an SEO agency offer different services. An SEO agency will dive deeper into the more technical aspects of SEO that can affect website performance and rankings (in a way that an SEO content writer generally won’t do!) We’ll come onto that a bit more later.

Related content: The biggest problems with SEO companies

Who is the winner?

For cost? An SEO content writer!

An SEO content writer is usually cheaper than hiring a full-service SEO agency. Seeing as content has the biggest impact on your search engine rankings (particularly if you have a healthy website) then this might be the best option for you.

Either way, you’re going to need content if you want to increase search engine rankings and get more traffic to your website. And we think hiring a specialist content writer who understands SEO, rather than a specialist SEO who may or may not ‘get’ good writing, is best.

2. SEO Content Writer vs SEO Agency: What does their service include?

We’ve talked about cost, however, there is another side that relates to the value of the service.

What are you actually getting for your money?

Is the service the same, or are you paying for two different things?

What does an SEO content writer do?

A traditional content writer does just that – writes content! And while an SEO content writer does everything that a traditional one does, they also focus on (you guessed it) Search Engine Optimisation.

Their main task revolves around creating blogs that help your website rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

They should have a comprehensive understanding of SEO, and how to optimise written content for keywords without stuffing them in and making it totally nonsensical. However, they will usually work off a content plan created by a business, rather than planning or directing the content themselves.

Will SEO content writers write guest posts on other websites?

In addition, some SEO content writers will create guest posts for other websites to help increase the backlinks to your website. This increases your Google authority and business awareness and overall improves your SEO. But they won’t do the ‘outreach’ for you i.e. approach website owners asking them if they will accept a guest blog post.

If you’re planning on hiring a content writer to do guest posting for you, you’ll probably need to do the outreach yourself. But if you have a strong network of people you can approach, hiring an SEO content writer can be a much more affordable option.

Most SEO content writers:

DOs:
✅ Write professional, well-written and engaging content
✅ Understand tone of voice and style
✅ Have knowledge of SEO and how to rank on search engines
✅ Be able to optimise your content for keywords and phrases
✅ Might offer keyword research

DON’Ts
❌ Upload the content to your website
❌ Create or source imagery
❌ Run an SEO audit
❌ Run a technical audit on your website to understand if there’s anything preventing you or limiting your search engine rankings (such as slow site speed)

Of course, each individual will vary, but this is the most common service for SEO content writers to offer.

What does an SEO agency do?

In comparison, SEO agencies focus on all aspects of SEO (not just the content).

They may offer writing (although in some cases they outsource this as they’re not specialist writers). Plus they look at building backlinks, technical SEO (such as website speed, fixing issues, mobile-friendliness etc), and optimising website pages.

Plus, they take a much bigger role in keyword and competitor research in order to find out what you should be ranking for with your content.

Most SEO agencies will:

DOs
✅ Competitor and keyword research
✅ Help direct blog topics
✅ They may outsource content writing or have in-house writers or give you some direction on the content for you to do yourself
✅ Optimise your content for keywords and phrases
✅ Build back-links
✅ Optimise website pages
✅ Fix any technical SEO aspects

DON’Ts
❌ Create or source imagery
❌ Often don’t focus on writing in your tone of voice/brand
❌ Often don’t focus on how to convert people from the content

Again, the exact package will vary depending on the agency, and cost.

Who is the winner?

SEO Agencies (but with a caveat!)

On the face of it, an SEO agency covers A LOT more ground than an SEO content writer, which you would expect given the difference in cost.

But because content is such a vital part of SEO, it really is important that whoever writes the content is an expert who knows how to write compelling content. You may rank on search engines with content, but that content still has to engage your reader. Otherwise, it’s all pretty pointless if they hit that backspace button!

So absolutely, SEO agencies do more stuff but make sure you choose one that prioritises content. The best place to start to check this is by looking at an SEO agency’s blog to see what kind of content they create for themselves. Is it helpful? Is it engaging? Or is it full of jargon or just about themselves and what award they’ve won that month?

Related Content: DIY SEO vs Hiring and Agency – Which One Should You Choose?

Remember: Content that gets backlinks has to be good

And remember, backlinks are another huge ranking factor. If you have backlinks to your website (i.e. links from other credible websites that link back to your site) then this tells Google you are trustworthy.

One of the best ways to gain backlinks is by producing stand-out content that people will link to. This is another reason why it’s so important you hire specialist writers who will do lots of research into your topic and write compelling content. Mediocre content does not get backlinks!

3. SEO Content Writer vs SEO Agency: what results do they get you?

RESULTS! They are kind of the reason that you are writing content, or worrying about SEO, right?

So, it’s definitely something you need to consider when choosing which one is right for your business.

And honestly, both SEO content writers and SEO agencies have the same ultimate goal:

To get your website ranking organically on search engines.

This should (in theory) lead to increased website traffic, and hopefully revenue for you💰.

The main goals of SEO content writers and SEO agencies are to:

✅  Increase your search engine rankings for a variety of keywords
✅  Increase your website traffic
✅  Increase your backlinks from high-authority websites

Luckily, this is super easy to track. You can do it in Google Analytics, which is completely free. So you can check how well your SEO agency or SEO content writer is doing.

Of course, SEO is great and everything, but it only kinda gets you halfway there. Once you have rankings and traffic you should want to convert that traffic into actual sales.

This is where your SEO content writer should come in. An SEO content writer should also focus on how to convert your readers into leads. They’ll do this by encouraging your reader to join your email list or find out more about your services.

Who is the winner?

A tie!

Both an SEO agency and an SEO content writer should increase your search engine rankings and website traffic.

But, SEO agencies can be more focused on the rankings and traffic, whereas an SEO content writer should also focus on converting readers into leads. However, an SEO agency is much more likely to give you a comprehensive report on how they are doing (such as the increase in rankings, traffic, backlinks, domain authority etc).

Whoever you choose, make sure they value leads and sales just as much (if not more!) than rankings and traffic. If you choose a content writer, you will probably need to keep an eye on how well things are going through your Google Analytics (it’s recommended you do this anyway). If you hire an SEO agency, you should receive a more comprehensive report from them.

4. SEO Content Writer vs SEO Agency: what’s the difference in skillset?

Although both SEO content writers and SEO agencies have the same ultimate goal their skillset, and emphasis on how they get there is a little different.

What skillset does an SEO content writer have?

As you would expect, SEO content writers are expert writers. Their aim is to capture the essence of your business and translate that into an engaging, entertaining and informative blog that your potential customers love and gain value from.

Yes, they’ll scatter in the necessary keywords, and optimise the entire blog so that Google likes the look of it. But that’s just because they understand you have to appease the Google Gods in order to rank in search engines.

SEO content writers are writing for humans.

And because of that, they are really good at emulating the tone of voice, building trust, nurturing relationships and ultimately converting website visitors into paying customers.

What skillset does an SEO agency have?

In comparison, SEO agencies’ skillset lies in SEO (unsurprisingly). And they are much more concerned with and knowledgeable about development and technical SEO.

SEO agencies understand all aspects of technical SEO and what makes a website appealing to search engines. They typically:

• Offer a website audit and fix any issues such as site speed
• Come up with an SEO strategy
• On-site SEO such as optimising your pages and imagery
• Off-site SEO such as creating a backlink strategy
• Content marketing – either in-house or outsourced

Yes, they can write content, however, many aren’t usually expert writers. And unless you pay larger fees for SEO agencies with expert in-house writers, you may find that they outsource content writing work to a freelancer. Because of this, you may find that they place less emphasis on things like brand voice and style. The articles may sound a little cold, overly factual and not particularly engaging.

Ultimately they are focussed on getting traffic to your website, and while content is a means to an end for this, it’s not the main focus.

Who is the winner?

A tie!

It’s difficult to pick a winner here as they both have different skillsets, and that’s okay. If you’re looking for a specialist writer who knows SEO, then an SEO content writer may be better. If you’re looking for more technical help and expertise, then an SEO agency may suit you better.

What if you need a specialist writer with technical knowledge?

It’s worth pointing out here that this is exactly why we set up our SEO and Blog Management Service. We are expert writers (Lyndsay has a master’s in creative writing and writes professionally for all sorts of businesses and industries), but we’re also web experts.

We ran a web agency for over a decade so understand all the technical issues that could prevent you from ranking. And we know how to write content and also how to upload it to your website, format it, design imagery etc.

If you’re looking for a company that sits nicely between an SEO content writer and an SEO agency, we might just be the right fit.

5. SEO Content Writer vs SEO Agency: how do they work?

Due to their overall goal, and associated skills, the actual process that an SEO content writer takes is quite different to an SEO agency.

How does an SEO content writer work?

An SEO content writer will dive straight into keyword research and writing. Their aim is to get content live on your website as soon as possible.

They will usually expect you to have a content plan ready (or they will charge more to create this) and from there they will write your content.

They typically check in with you every month to see what content you’d like to publish for that month. They’ll often write 2, 3 or 4 blog posts per month and they usually recommend you commit to 3 months working with them (although often, they have no minimum commitment).

They might need to get some of the expert knowledge from your brain to theirs and can do this via email, video, voice notes or whatever suits you.

But then they are off! 🐎

Tapping away on their laptop getting content ready for your business.

Once they’re finished it’s usually up to you to upload this content, format it, design imagery and optimise it for search engines. Some SEO content writers may upload it for you, others avoid this as they’re not web experts and every content management system is different.

How do SEO agencies work?

SEO agencies take a more reserved, strategic approach.

You’ve got to know where you are in order to know what work needs to be done.  SEO agencies will usually kick things off with an SEO audit to see how your website performs and if there are any technical issues to fix. They’ll also examine your current traffic, rankings, backlinks etc to see where you are right now. They’ll probably have a gander at your competitors’ websites too.

This allows them to create a plan that will get you from where you are, to where you want to be. This plan will vary depending on exactly what’s going on with your current setup.

After this, they’ll likely get on keyword research and focus on fixing any technical issues that are stopping your website from ranking.

They’ll then focus on on-page SEO, i.e. optimising your current website pages for search engines.

It’s not usually until after this is all done that they start to turn their attention to content creation (if that’s included within their package). So, it may be a few months before you actually see any content being produced or published. Of course, this depends on the company and budget, but they tend to get to content later on in the process.

SEO Content Writer vs SEO agency: which one should you pick?

So, content writer or SEO agency: which one is right for you?

Ultimately, which one is best for your business will depend on what support you are looking for, and what your business budget is.

Hiring an SEO content writer will usually deliver results faster and cheaper but only if your website is healthy. That means there’s nothing preventing or limiting it from getting ranked on search engines. In other cases, you may want a full SEO agency to manage all the technical aspects of your website, especially if you have a large website with a lot of pages and lots going on!

However, there is a third option, which is a blog management service.

It’s kind of a mid-point between SEO content writers and SEO agencies. We do an SEO audit and deep dive of your website, identifying any problems. Plus, we do ALL the work around your blog including planning, writing, optimising for SEO, designing imagery, uploading and formatting. Basically, we manage the entire blog!

We take care of any SEO issues, while also creating content that ranks and drives traffic to your website. Which is really the best of both worlds! Win/Win!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post SEO Content Writer vs SEO Agency: Which One is Best for Your Business? appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

You might have even heard of content writing.

But how have those two things been mushed together, and what the heck is it?

In this article, I’ll explain exactly what an SEO content writing service is. And more importantly, how SEO content writing can be an absolute gamechanger for your business.

Firstly, what is an SEO content writing service?

An SEO content writing service is the process of creating content for your website that helps you rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

The company or freelancer who offers this service will usually create content in the form of blog articles (just like this one).

Some companies can also create guest posts that are added to other websites (not just the client’s website). The aim of this is to increase the number of backlinks to your website, increasing your authority in the eyes of Google.

What does an SEO content writing service include?

At the heart of it, an SEO content writer should be able to produce compelling content written in your tone of voice and style.

The content should be highly engaging and get your reader to take action. This is the same for all content writers, whether they specialise in SEO writing or not.

So what’s the difference between an SEO content writer and a content writer?

The main difference is in the extra ‘stuff’ included within the SEO content writing service and the overall aim of the content.

An SEO content writer should have a deep understanding of SEO. They should know how to optimise your content for your chosen keywords and phrases (without it sounding like a repetitive mess!)

They should know how to get you ranked on Google and advise you on the best ways to do it.

What is the goal of SEO Content Writing?

Just like content writers, SEO content writers should create compelling, engaging content that users love to read.

If you use an SEO content writing service you should expect the overall goal of the content to focus on website traffic and search engine rankings.

Any good SEO content writing service should:

• • Increase your search engine rankings for a variety of keywords
  • Increase your website traffic
  • Increase your backlinks from high-authority websites

As stated in Search Engine Journal, the main issue with SEO content writing services is often they focus too much on rankings but don’t know how to convert that traffic into customers.

Are you thinking of hiring a company or freelancer to help you with SEO content writing? It’s a good idea you look for a company that can create compelling copy that converts AND help you rank on search engines.

What are some key elements an SEO Content Writing Service could include?

Writing is just a part of what makes a successful, high-ranking blog. There’s actually a lot more that goes on behind the scenes.

Some SEO content writing services will include:

Keyword research

SEO content writing services may also include keyword research.

Keyword research is the process of finding out what topics and specific keywords and phrases people are searching for around your products and services.

If someone is doing this on your behalf, they will identify the topics you can realistically rank for that get a healthy number of searches each month. If they offer this as part of the SEO content writing service, then they’ll go ahead and write the content based on this research. Simple.

Content strategy

SEO content writing services are primarily focused on getting more traffic to your content via search engine rankings.

But good SEO content writing services should also focus on the entire buyer’s journey. It shouldn’t just be about getting people through the door (or finding you from Google), you also want to convert people too.

That’s why some SEO content writing services also offer content strategy as part of the service. They’ll help you form a strategy that guides people through the entire customer journey–from finding you to buying from you. This means they may create some content that isn’t designed to get website traffic, it’s designed to convert people into paying customers.

On-Page Optimisation

Some SEO content writing services will include on-page optimisation as part of the service. This means they’ll upload the content for you and ensure it’s optimised and formatted correctly for SEO. For example, they’ll optimise your URL, title tag, imagery, meta description and select your categories and tags.

This will increase your chances of ranking in search results. Optimising your content for your keywords is only part of what will help it rank, a lot of work also has to happen on your website itself too!

If you want to learn how to do this yourself, check out our article on how to optimise your blog post.

Measuring success

Some companies will track your search engine rankings as they continue to create content for you. They’ll also track things like the number of backlinks to your website, website traffic and leads coming through the site.

This is helpful as you can see what is working and what isn’t working so well and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Creating imagery

Some SEO writers or companies will even create bespoke imagery and optimise it for search engines. Some will also use stock image websites and ensure these are optimised for search engines too.

Who offers SEO content writing as a service?

There are a few types of freelancers or companies that offer SEO content writing as a service. And they all differ slightly in price, process and approach.

1. SEO Content Writers

These are typically freelance writers who have knowledge and experience in SEO. They are able to write blog articles and optimise them for search engines.

Some of them will offer keyword research as part of their service, which means they will research the topics, keywords and phrases that your audience is searching for.

Others won’t offer keyword research. They will ask you what keywords or phrases you’d like to rank for or what you think people are searching for. They’ll then optimise your blog post for these keywords and phrases.

Many don’t upload your content to your website and optimise your SEO settings. They will leave that part to you. But some will write things like the meta description for you, leaving you to add that to your website.

Some may upload the content to your website if it’s a platform (or content management system) they are already familiar with. There are a lot of different website platforms, and writers tend not to have knowledge of them all (nor should they need to!)

A quick overview of SEO Content Writers and what they do

Generally, this is what SEO content writers do and/or specialise in

• They are professional writers, often with experience in writing for business
• They have knowledge of SEO
• They are able to optimise your content for keywords and phrases
• Some will offer keyword research as part of the service
• Often they don’t upload your content to your website
• Often they don’t create imagery

How much does it cost to hire an SEO Content Writer?

SEO Content Writers can typically charge anywhere between £250 – £1000+ per blog article. I know that’s wildly different amounts!

I also understand that this can sound expensive. But remember, both writing and SEO are highly-skilled work, and it’s likely that the SEO content writer has a lot of experience and expertise. Plus, it will take them time to research and write each article. Hence the price tag!

2. SEO Agencies

Many SEO agencies offer content writing as part of the service. This is often part of a broader service where they’ll also offer things like keyword research, an SEO audit, technical SEO, improving your website’s performance, and increasing backlinks to your website.

Some agencies will outsource the content writing they do for clients, as writing isn’t their specialism. Some will have in-house writers.

SEO agencies are highly focused on getting traffic to your website, and as many are not expert ‘writers’, you may find they place less emphasis on your brand voice and style. The content is merely a means to an end, and that end is website traffic.

They will usually upload your content to your website and optimise it for search engines, but may not have the skills required to create fancy graphics.

A quick overview of SEO Agencies and what they do

• They are experts in SEO and focus on all aspects of SEO (such as technical SEO or increasing backlinks)
• They may outsource content writing or have writers in-house
• They are able to optimise your content for keywords and phrases
• They will offer keyword research
• They will upload and optimise your content
• Often they don’t create imagery

How much does it cost to hire an SEO Agency for this service?

They are usually more expensive than SEO content writers. A lot of SEO agencies have 6-month contracts and prices will vary from £1000 – £10,000+ per month (if they’re a pretty decent agency). And the more content they create generally the more expensive it is.

Remember that’s not just for creating content, that’s for an entire SEO service.

We know of a lot of great SEO agencies, but we also know that there are a lot of problems in the industry too. If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO agency, you might want to check out our article on the problems with SEO agencies.

3. Blog Management Agencies

This is where we sit.

Blog management agencies are less well known than content writers or SEO agencies, but they do similar things.

A blog management agency does exactly what it says, they manage every aspect of your blog. That means everything from keyword research and strategy, to content writing and creating imagery.

If they have a focus on SEO (like we do), they should hit the balance between creating compelling content and ranking on search engines.

Some of them will also be able to advise if there’s anything technically on your website that will hinder your rankings (like us!)

They may also write guest blog posts in order for you to build your backlinks to your website, building your authority with Google.

A quick overview of Blog Management Agencies and what they do

• They are expert writers and can write in your tone of voice and style
• They understand content strategy and should create content that helps people go through the entire buyer’s journey – from finding you to buying from you
• They should do keyword research for you
• They will upload your content to your website and optimise it for you
• They are knowledgeable in SEO
• Some (like us) should be able to create custom graphics for your blog posts
• Many don’t understand technical SEO (such as website speed, mobile-friendliness, broken links etc) so they can’t advise on that

How much does it cost to hire a Blog Management Agency?

There aren’t that many blog management agencies out there, and the ones that do offer this service don’t give a price unless you get on a call with them (annoying).

But a blog management agency would usually sit between an SEO content writer and an SEO agency.

We charge a minimum of £1397 per month for our blog management service.

Is an SEO Content Writing Service right for you?

Whether you choose an SEO content writer, SEO agency or blog management agency, SEO content writing can have HUGE benefits for your business.

Not only can you use that content to rank on search engines and deliver traffic to your website, but you can also repurpose it across your social media channels too. In fact, I can get 4-8 LinkedIn posts just from one blog post! You can learn more about how to repurpose a blog post here.

So yes, it’s an investment, but for many businesses, you’ll certainly see a good ROI from it.

And don’t forget to check out our SEO blog writing service for more information.

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post What is an SEO content writing service? And how does it all work?  appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

But for years now we’ve offered SEO services, previously alongside our web design, and now as part of our SEO blog writing & management service. We’re experts, and so we know that not all SEO companies are created equal.

And, while we know that SEO is hugely beneficial for your business it’s also a BIG investment (both in time and money). And that’s why you need to choose the right company to get you to the top of those all-important search results.

Are we saying that SEO companies are full of problems?

Of course NOT. There are some GREAT ones out there that can help you get your website ranking highly on Google.

However, SEO is not well-known as being a trustworthy or reputable industry. And unfortunately, there are some common problems we see with some SEO agencies we think you should be wary of.

So in this blog, we’re exploring some of the most common problems with hiring an SEO agency and giving you a solution to fix them.

But First: Why do you need to think about SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of making changes or additions to your website in order to help you rank highly in search engine results.

When was the last time you clicked on page two of Google’s search results?

Not very often, right?

So, ideally, you’ll want to rank on the first page of Google results, and with the first few spots if possible. The top five organic search results account for 67.60% of all website clicks from search engines. If you aren’t appearing within these first five spots, then you’re probably not getting much traffic from search engines.

A good SEO strategy gives you a higher chance of ranking for keywords, which in turn increases organic traffic to your website. And the best part is that organic traffic is free. So, it’s definitely worthwhile!

So, what is an SEO agency or company?

An SEO agency will partner with you to optimise your website, improve search visibility and ultimately drive more traffic to your website.

However, as with all marketing efforts, it should help to drive leads, sales and ultimately revenue for your business. And if it’s not, then it’s not doing its job properly.

But, there are some problems with SEO agencies that mean it won’t have an impact on your bottom line in the way that it should.

Related content: 11 Reasons You’re NOT Ranking in Google & How To Fix It

What are the main problems with SEO companies?

When it comes to SEO we’ve been there done that and got a lot of happy customers to prove it. We’ve provided SEO services in the past alongside our web design business, and now include it as part of our SEO blog writing & management service now.

So it’s safe to say that we know how to ensure that your website and content rank highly on search engines.

However, we’ve also seen the ugly side of SEO, so know what to look out for when finding a company. And we think that it’s something that you need to be aware of too before hiring a company.

1. They are expensive
2. They don’t advise on messaging and copy
3. They may not produce content
4. Reports can seem overwhelming
5. Difficult to find a reliable company
6. Can take a while to see results
7. May not be honest about search volume
8. They don’t practice what they preach
9. They guarantee search engine results

So, let’s get into it…

1. SEO agencies can be expensive

Did you know that Jammy Digital wasn’t our first foray into the world of business?

Years ago we started a business selling cushions and soft furnishings on the internet. We invested every last penny that we had into building a website. And then, once the website was live…tumbleweed. Absolutely nothing!

Why?🤔

Because we weren’t getting any traffic to our website, and so weren’t making any sales.

When we asked our web designer about it he told us that we’d have to spend up to £5000 a month on something called SEO 😱

You can imagine our shock, after spending all our money on our website, that now we were going to going to have to spend more money.

SEO can cost between £100- £10,000+ per month, depending on who you hire, what you need, how competitive the search terms are and the amount of work that needs to happen to get you ranking on search engines.

So, why is SEO so expensive?

A well thought out and executed SEO strategy requires expertise, time and work. Those three things cost money.

But however much you spend you absolutely should see a healthy return on investment. So yes, it may seem expensive, but if you’re getting a good ROI, that makes it all worth it, right?

Unfortunately, as we’ll explore further here, some of the issues around SEO companies mean that you might not get results even if you are paying a professional to do it every month. And this is why it’s perceived as expensive. Because of course, it’s expensive if you don’t get that money back!

Are you paying for SEO confusion?

Finally, SEO may be pricy because it can seem like a bit of a mystery. For example, SEO is (typically) more expensive than hiring a content writer, even though both will help you get better search results. The SEO industry can charge more simply because it’s more difficult to understand. Whereas with writing, people have a full understanding of how it works and may perceive it as less valuable.

Related content: 5 FREE ways to check keyword rankings in Google

2. They don’t advise on messaging and copy

Woohoo!

The SEO is working! Your website is drowning in traffic, with loads of hits every single day. But, it isn’t resulting in any more leads or sales. 😔

What’s going on?

The truth is that there are loads of different issues that can result in failed conversions.

Maybe you’ve got a bad user experience?

Or, maybe the copy isn’t compelling enough?

Or perhaps your website looks like it was last designed in 1992 and it’s putting people off?

Traffic is great! It’s often the precursor to more sales. But it takes more than traffic to convert those potential customers into paying customers.

SEO companies often won’t mention or even think to look for any issues with the user experience or copy. Because it’s not really their problem. They want to get lots of eyeballs on your website and once they’ve done that their job is done.

However, getting people to your website and not making sales is a massive waste of money. And it’s something that a good SEO specialist should be able to point out to you.

We’ve personally turned clients away if they don’t have what’s needed to make their content and SEO work – i.e. an easy to use website that clearly shows what you do and appeals to your target audience.

3. They might not produce content for you

If you want to grab one of those coveted top spots on Google then you’ve got to create amazing content that is going to be relevant to those searches. That means you’ve got to have blogs, videos, landing pages and sales pages – filled with keyword optimised content.

The average content length of the article in the top position on Google is 2,416 words. So if you want to rank highly on search engines then you need to be producing long-form content.

SEO companies (should) know this, however, they’ll often ask you to create your own content. Alternatively content will be an added cost, on top of the £100 – £10,000/month that you are already paying. Suddenly it’s all adding up and becoming very pricey indeed.

Or worse still, they might just not mention it and they’ll focus on link building or technical SEO. As long as they are getting you more traffic they are doing their job. 🤷.

But as you know to really utilise the impact of SEO you need content. So you either need to do it yourself or pay SEO specialists more to do it for you.

This is part of the reason that we’ve bundled content and SEO all together in one package (along with a few other things). So that you are getting quality, consistent content that drives traffic and is SEO optimised.

Related content: The Biggest SEO mistakes you’re making (and what to do instead)

4. Reports can seem overwhelming

The reports that SEO companies send you every month can seem overwhelming and full of jargon 🙄

Of course, you want to know what has been done, and what impact that has had on your business, especially when you are spending money. However, it’s important that the right metrics are being reported to you – rather than ALL of them.

SEO reports can include overall organic traffic, backlinks, website speed, technical website health and keyword rankings among other things. But this might not mean a lot to you.

Speak to your SEO specialist to understand what KPIs you might need to measure, and have reported on. These might include:

• What keywords are ranking and where?
• Are we getting traffic to our website?
• Is that turning into leads and sales?
  How is that affecting our revenue and profit?

5. It’s difficult to find a reliable company

Pretty much anyone could open up an SEO agency tomorrow and start selling themselves as an expert.

There is a really low barrier to entry ⛔, which is great in some respects, as it means that anyone can become an expert – even you!

However, it also means that there are a lot of dodgy SEO companies out there who aren’t qualified or experienced to deliver results to your business. This is exacerbated by the fact that SEO can seem like a total dark art to many business owners. The lack of knowledge and understanding on the business side, coupled with a dodgy SEO company means that a LOT of money can be spent with not a lot of results.

Looking for SEO agencies with good testimonials, who implement a good content and SEO strategy themselves is a good place to start.

If they can’t show that they have a successful SEO strategy themselves how are they going to do it for you?

6. It can take a while to see results

How long does it take to see results from your SEO efforts?

The magic number you’ll hear bandied about in the SEO world is 3-6 months. And that can be the case, it can take a while for SEO agencies to deliver results. Especially if they are focussing on the technical SEO aspects of your website rather than creating content.

However, one of the biggest SEO myths is that it takes 6 months to see results. When the truth is if done well it can take less than a day to rank for your chosen keywords and phrases.

We recently wrote and published a blog for a client that ranked on the first page of Google for their BIG target keyword within a couple of days. But of course, it doesn’t end there, you keep writing and publishing relevant content. The more content you create the more keywords and phrases you’ll rank for. (As long as you follow the right strategy and optimise it correctly).

There’s not a 1-month limit. Or a 3-month limit. Or a 6-month limit. If you want to be successful at SEO and content, then it needs to be part of your business forever. And you need to work with someone that is open and honest about this commitment. It doesn’t always have to be via an agency, you might eventually hire in-house, but it will always need to be a part of your business.

Related content: WordPress SEO For Blogging – How to Optimise Your WordPress Blog Post

7. They may not be honest about search volumes

We could write a blog today about “moon exercises” and rank number one on Google pretty quickly.

We’re not just blowing my own trumpet🎺 (although we’re pretty good at creating content). It’s because the term moon exercises barely have any keyword volume – meaning no one is searching for it. This makes total sense as no one is casually joining an exercise class on the moon.

It would also make it pretty easy to write a blog that would rank highly on search engines.

But why would we bother when no one is searching for that keyword?

You might think that there are certain keywords and search terms that you want your website and blog to rank for. But they won’t always be the best terms, and sometimes SEO companies won’t be upfront about the search volumes of those keywords.

Recently we did some keyword research on behalf of a client. They were optimising their website and content for the name of their service followed by the word ‘partner’.

But actually, their audience didn’t use the word ‘partner’ they used the word ‘consultant’. And there was a vast difference in search volume (less than 10 searches a month for ‘partner’ and over 600 searches a month for ‘consultant’).

That’s why keyword research is essential and finding an SEO & content specialist who will be honest about what you need to be ranking for in order to grow your business is crucial.

8. They don’t practice what they preach

Found an SEO agency that doesn’t rank for any of the keywords in their industry?

It’s an ongoing joke (especially in marketing circles) that your own business comes last. SEO companies aren’t paying themselves, and so sometimes their own SEO comes after client work.

Which is totally understandable to an extent. However, if they aren’t doing any of the things they are suggesting that you do then you’ve got a problem. Not only does it make you question the effectiveness of their SEO strategies, but it calls into question their expertise and qualifications.

Your SEO company should be creating content that is optimised for search engines, and that is ranking for the relevant keywords.

If they can’t do it for themselves, how are they going to do it for you?

9. They guarantee search engine rankings

Unless an SEO company owns Google, they can’t guarantee rankings!

Of course, they can show you examples of client work and how their SEO strategy was implemented, and the results that it had. They can show you testimonials from existing clients. But they cannot guarantee that you will achieve the same.

Google can be a fickle little beast, that changes on a whim. And in addition, you’re competing against competitors in your industry and have no control over what they post.

So no one can absolutely guarantee that you’ll be ranking in the number one spot for every single keyword. And if they are – run the other way.

Should you hire an SEO agency? (and how to find a good one)

So, after telling you all the problems with SEO you might think they are the devil 😈

Are we saying that SEO is useless and shouldn’t be invested in?

Absolutely not!

As SEO specialists we know just how crucial a good SEO strategy is to the success of any business. However, it’s just part of the success puzzle, not the entire picture, and there are many other things that you need to think about.

But, the truth is, if you are spending thousands on a fancy SEO strategy every month and you’re NOT creating quality, consistent content, that is speaking to what your customers are searching for then you might be wasting money🤷.

Rather than spending thousands a month a better place to start might be with a good, SEO optimised, content strategy. This will help you rank on search engines as well as build trust with potential customers and convert them into paying customers.

So, what should you look for when looking for a company to help improve your website SEO?

1. Companies that create content for their clients and themselves
2. Ones that don’t guarantee rankings
3. Are honest with you about what to expect, and the best way to get there
4. Companies that don’t use stupid jargon

As part of our SEO Blog Writing & Management package, we do ALL the work for you including planning, writing and optimising for SEO. And we do all this for a very reasonable price if you are looking for a complete package that will take everything you need into consideration.

If you want to see how your current blog is ranking on the six key components, then take our blog quiz now – and see where you need to improve and more importantly how.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post The Biggest Problems with SEO Companies (and how you can avoid them!) appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Do you blog?

If you’ve answered yes to both you’re in the right place. Because you’re probably wondering how on earth you can SEO your WordPress blog posts so you get higher search engine rankings. 

We won’t lie to you, SEO is not a sexy topic to talk about. A lot of people zone out as soon as we mention those three letters – They try and hide it, but we can see it in their eyes! 

That’s why we put together this handy guide to help you optimise your WordPress blog posts.

Don’t worry.

It doesn’t need to be technical.

It doesn’t need to be complicated.

And there’s a plugin (or two) for that.

Ready to get into it?

Firstly, why use WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular site builder and content management system out there. We love it because it’s completely customisable and super easy to use.

You don’t even need any knowledge of code or programming language at all because yes, it’s that easy to use! And when you come across something you can’t do, you have loads of people (other website owners or experts) and reputable forums you can go to for help. And even better, if there’s something you’re struggling with, there’s probably a trialled and tested plugin that will do the job for you.

But there are also some slightly more technical reasons why WordPress is always a great choice if you want your website to be found on Google. For example, WordPress offers a clean URL structure that allows you to create unique web addresses for each page. And it’s not built with lots of unnecessary code, which means it’s fairly lightweight and quicker than other platforms. And the search engines love that!

Ultimately, you can easily use SEO on your WordPress blog posts – even if you’re a beginner at SEO. 

We have a whole long list of reasons why we love and always recommend WordPress. You can read them all in the blog post Why Do We ONLY Use WordPress To Build Your Website?

Different WordPress plugins you can use to optimise your content

One of the big reasons why we recommend WordPress to all our clients and members is that it gives you access to easy-to-install plugins that allow you to optimise your content easily. And here are some of our favourites:

• Yoast SEO plugin. One of the most popular SEO plugins out there, it has a great free version, you can use it on multiple websites, and it comes with an extensive number of features to help you make your website more search-engine friendly.
• SEOPress also has a free version and is another strong contender when it comes to WordPress plugins for SEO. It includes most of the key SEO tools you’re likely to need and it works fast.
• Another WordPress SEO plugin worth checking out is All in One SEO (AIOSEO). 

But how exactly can these plugins help you optimise your WordPress blog posts?

How to SEO your WordPress blog posts – longtail keywords

When it comes to search engine optimising your WordPress blog posts, there are a few things we recommend you do to the text (or the content) of your article. But first thing first, you need to decide on the longtail keyword (or phrase) you want your content to be found for.

So, for example, if you’ve written a fantastic piece on how to grow your Personal Training business, you might want to optimise it for the longtail keyword “promote fitness business”. That means you’re going to include that phrase in various key, strategic places inside your blog post in order to give yourself the best chances of ranking high in the search results when someone goes looking for that phrase.

So let’s have a look at where you need to include the focus keyphrase you’ve picked. We’ll look at the following places…

1. Adding your keyword to your main heading or title
2. Using your keyphrase naturally in your subheadings
3. Adding your keywords naturally through your main body text
4. Using your keywords with your blog post images
5. Optimising your internal links
6. Using outbound links in your article

Let’s get started! 

1. Adding your keyword to your main heading or title

The very first place to add your keyword to (in our example, “promote fitness business”) is your blog post title. This is right at the top of your screen when you write your blog post. 

So using the same example as above, your blog post title might be something like:

• “10 Easy Steps to Promote your Fitness Business”.
• Or “How to Promote your Fitness Business in 2022”.
• Or even “The Best Marketing Strategies to Promote your Fitness Business”

How to assign a blog post title in WordPress

When you first create a post, simply type in your title, and WordPress will automatically assign it a Heading 1 tag (or Title Tag). That’s the only Heading 1 you’re going to use throughout your blog post.

Google will understand that this is a ‘H1 tag’, and the words you use in within this summarise exactly what your article is about. It’s hugely important for SEO, so try to make your title clear (and of course, include your keyword!) 

Top tip! The sooner your keyword phrase appears in the title, the better for SEO purposes.

2. Using your keyphrase naturally in your subheadings

Your subheadings are the Heading 2s, Heading 3s, Heading 4s etc. that you include in the body of your blog post to give it a nice structure and to make it easier for your readers to read through your content.

To SEO your WordPress blog posts for search, include the keyword phrase in some of your subheadings – not all of them, mind. You don’t want to sound too repetitive and robotic. It needs to sound natural and read well. If it doesn’t fit in the context of that section of the text, don’t try and force it.

How to assign a subheading in WordPress

As you can see below, we’ve added a H2 tag to the example blog post. To do this in WordPress all you need to do is simply highlight the text you want as your subheading, and change the text from pargraph to Heading 2, 3 or 4 etc. You can see where we’ve done this in the red circle.

Make sure your subheadings make sense. Your heading 3 should come under your heading 2 etc. Don’t mix them randomly! Google (and your end-user) read these to understand what’s most important on the page. It’s good for SEO and user-experience if you keep them logical and consistent. 

Top tip! Don’t worry about using variations of your keyword such as ‘promoting your fitness business’ or ‘promote your fitness and lifestyle business’ – Google is smart and will understands ‘user-intent’ i.e. the goal of the searcher (even if they use slightly different wording).

3. Adding your keywords naturally through your main body text

You’ll also want to include your focus keyword in the main text of your blog post and not just once. In fact, the longer the piece of content, the more time it’s recommended you use your focus keyword. Aim for 2 or 3 times at least, but if you’re writing a longer piece, your SEO plugins might suggest you sprinkle your keyword around the main body of the blog post a few more times.

When doing this though, always make sure the keyword phrase fits in the text naturally and organically. Don’t try to shoehorn it afterwards and out of context because your readers will be able to see through that. And they’ll quickly get fed up with reading and hit the back button. And that’s definitely not good for you or your SEO efforts!

How to add your keyword or phrase through your main body copy in WordPress

This part is simple. All your need to do is write as normal and include your keywords/phrases. There’s an example below highlighted in red (just please don’t highlight all your keywords and phrases 😂). 

Top tip! In all honesty, we don’t focus overally on keywords within our main copy. Yes, we may mention them. But it’s important you write for your users first. Write naturally, use personality. Don’t worry too much about keywords otherwise you’ll sound like a robot!

4. Using your keywords with your blog post images

No one wants to read a blog post that looks like a wall of text without breaks or images, do they? That’s not very easy on the eyes, so always make sure you include some relevant images with your blog posts.

The thing is though, Google and the other search engines cannot ‘see’ images as you and I do. To them, an image is a collection of pixels. It’s just a bunch of data. So in order to tell Google what your image is all about, include your focus keyword in two key places:

1. The name of the file. Wherever you can, just rename the file and make sure you include your focus keyword in there.
2. The Alt Description. This is a bit of text that you can populate when you edit the image. The Alt Description is normally used to describe to Google (in words) what the image is all about, and it’s the perfect place for you to add your focus keyword.

How to add an Alt Description in WordPress

Firstly, you’ll need to add your image. To do this, go to ‘insert’ at the top of your page. 

Then go down to ‘add media’ and upload your file (the tab on the left). 

Once you’ve done this on the right hand side you will see a section where you can add your ALT text. 

Top tip! There’s no need to add the phrase ‘image of’ or ‘picture of’ when adding your ALT text, just go straight into it. 

5. Optimising your internal links

Another important factor for SEO on your WordPress blog is including internal links in your content. These are contextual links to your own website – the same website where you’re publishing the blog post you’re writing. The reason why they’re important for SEO is that they tell Google how various pieces of your own content are related to each other.

It’s a bit like giving Google the ‘map’ for your website. Internal links tell the search engine that piece A is linked to piece B, piece B is linked to piece C, etc. Plus, they help your readers delve deeper into your content and get to know you and your work better. When you think about it, adding internal links is a great piece of customer service.

Don’t add these in at random though! Make sure you include internal links wherever they’re relevant. For example, if you briefly mention a topic that you’ve covered in more detail in another piece, add the link to that piece of content. You don’t have to have loads – 2-5 is plenty!

How to add an Internal Links in WordPress

All you need to do is highlight your text and click on the ‘insert link button’ (picture below) to link internally.  

Top tip! Don’t link the words ‘click here’ actually link your keyword or phrase instead, as then Google will understand more about the article you are linking too. 

6. Using outbound links in your article 

For similar reasons, outbound links are also important. These tell the search engines that your piece of content doesn’t just exist in isolation. So always try to add relevant outbound links to authoritative websites. This could be the BBC, national newspapers and other news outlets, or authority websites in your niche or industry.

You can actually see how ‘authoritive’ a website is by checking a website’s domain authority. This is where you can see how trustworthy a website is. Sidenote, do you see what we did there with linking out? 😉

Again, remember to only include links that are relevant and organic – you want to add value to your readers and give more authority to your content.

Top tip! This is a controversial one but for outbound links, we set them to open up in a new tab. This is because we still want people to remain on our website and not visit BBC then get distracted by something else – forgetting to come back to us! This is just for outbound links we do this. 

How to add an External Links in WordPress

You follow the exact same process as above (for internal links). However, you may want to set your link to open in a new tab. To do this, simply click on the gear icon when you’ve inserted your link. And then select ‘open in new tab’. 

How to use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimise your WordPress blog posts

So now you’ve sprinkled your keyword of choice in all the right places and done all the right things to give you brownie points with Google, you’ll want to use the additional features in your SEO plugin of choice and populate a few more entries. And here we’re going to give you an example of how to use the Yoast SEO plugin.

The Yoast plugin allows you to use search engine optimise your blog posts easily. There’s a free version too, so it’s well worth installing!

When you install and activate Yoast SEO on your WordPress website, if you scroll down to the end of your blog posts, you’ll see two separate tabs – one called ‘SEO’ and one called ‘Readability’. When you click on the ‘SEO’ tab, this shows you a few fields:

1. Focus keyphrase
2. SEO title
3. Slug
4. Meta Description.

So let’s get through each one in a bit more detail.

1. Focus keyphrase

This is easy. Remember when you decided on the phrase you wanted to optimise your blog post for before you even started writing it? We used the example “promote fitness business” earlier, so in this case, that’s what we’d type into the ‘Focus keyphrase’ field.

This won’t impact your rankings in any way, but it does tell Yoast what you would like to rank for. The plugin will scan your post (or page) for this keyword/phrase and tell you how well you’ve optimised your page for it. 

How to insert your focus keyphrase into Yoast

Just scroll to the bottom of your blog post to find your Yoast information. You’ll see the words, ‘Focus Keyphrase’, just go ahead and add your keyphrase into that section. Easy-peasy! 

Top tip – don’t worry about including words like “a”, “the”, “your” in the keyphrase. People don’t always type that kind of stuff when doing searches, so you don’t need to include it.

2. SEO title

Also known as the ‘Title Tag’, this is the title of your blog post that Google and the search engines will display when people run a search. If you look just above the ‘SEO title’ entry under the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll see a section called ‘Google Preview’, which shows you (in blue) what your title looks like. In order to optimise your blog post, you want to make sure you include your longtail keyword in there.

If you don’t do this manually, WordPress will automatically take the title of your blog post and add this here, but you may find this is too long. It may also add other unnecessary details like your website name, which is fine if you have room but best to leave out if you don’t!

How to write your Title Tag using Yoast

Under the ‘SEO title’ section, you may need to delete anything prepopulated here (depending on how it looks under the ‘Google preview’ section). Once you’ve done that you can type in a more appropriate title that contains your keyword/phrase. 

Top tip – the earlier your focus keyword appears in the title, the better!

3. Meta Description

This is the bit in the search results that appears underneath the blog post title (the one in blue). This short bit of text gives the readers a little preview of what the content is all about.

When an exact match of your search term appears in the Meta Description, it’s highlighted in bold. This tells a user that your content is relevant to their search, so always make sure you populate the ‘Meta Description’ entry in the Yoast SEO plugin and stick to the length recommended by the plugin. You’ll see the traffic light go red if you’re over the maximum character length.

How to write your Meta Description using Yoast

Just head to the ‘meta description’ section and add an enticing description of your blog post that encourages people to click. Use the green and red marker to make sure you don’t go over your word count (where Google will cut off your words!)

Top tip – the meta description doesn’t impact the SEO for your WordPress blog post, however, it does encourage people to click on your website once you appear in search results. So make sure it’s enticing!

4. Slug

Also known as the ‘URL permalink, this is the unique web address allocated to your piece of content. Say you went for the blog title “How to Promote your Fitness Business”, your URL might look something like this:

www.yourwebsitname.com/promote-fitness-business

As you can see, there’s no need to use the full title there. In fact, the shorter your URL, the better! What matters for optimisation purposes is that your focus keyword is in there.

How to create your URL using Yoast

Head over to the section that says ‘slug’ and add your slug here, using hyphens to separate each word. You don’t need to add the www.yourwebsitname.com/, just everything that comes after that. 

Top tip – Keep your URL slug short (2-3 words if you can) and remove all unneccary words like ‘the’ ‘and’ or ‘of’.

The SEO Analysis for Your WordPress Blog Post

Once you’ve written and optimised your blog post and added your focus keyword in all the relevant places, you can check the section called ‘SEO Analysis’ under your Yoast SEO plugin. Hopefully, the traffic light against it will be green, which means you’re good to go. If it’s amber or red, you can use the drop-down arrow on the right-hand side, and the plugin will tell you what you need to fix.

It could be that you haven’t added or optimised any images, or that you haven’t included any inbound or outbound links. Or even that you’ve used the keyword phrase but just not enough times. But if you follow the instructions in this blog post, you’ll know exactly what to do to remedy any of these points.

And if you want more cool tips on SEO, head over to the blog post, SEO For Beginners: The Ultimate Guide.

Having said all that… Please know that the traffic light system isn’t the end all be all of SEO! Because obsessing over the traffic light system is something we see people do all the time, and it’s a waste of your time.

Further Elements that Impact Your SEO for Your WordPress Blog

Although not WordPress specific, here are a few further elements that can impact your SEO results…

1. Wordcount

Word count (i.e. the length of your blog post) is also a big factor for SEO. Why? Because the type of content that’s published on the internet has changed over the years. Gone are the days when a short piece of 500 words would have ranked at the top of the search results. And that’s because people publish much longer content, which is why we always recommend you choose a specific topic and then go really in-depth when writing about it.

Ideally, you’re looking at creating blog posts over 1,000 words. But don’t be afraid to hit the 1,500-2,000 word mark (or even longer!) This will really help when it comes to your SEO for your WordPress Blog. Some of our top ranking articles are 2000+ words in length, and more importantly, they actually convert!

2. Include a Call to Action (CTA)

A Call to Action (or CTA) is your way of telling your readers what you want them to do once they’ve read your blog post. Do you want them to go read another piece of content? Check out your course or membership? Or maybe download your lead magnet and sign up to your email list?

Ideally, with your CTA you want to keep your audience on your website because this improves your bounce rate. Simply put, you want to stop your readers from hitting the back button and going back to Google to check out another piece of content. The longer they spend on your page, blog post, or website, the more Google takes this as a signal that your content is relevant, interesting, and trustworthy. And that means in the future when it comes to similar searches, they’ll rank your content higher than someone else’s who has a higher bounce rate than yours.

For example, here’s our call-to-action you’ve probably seen throughout our blog post – look at us getting it in here again 😉

3. Related content

And finally, you can add a section at the end of your blog post with ‘Related Content’. If it’s content you’ve published, this gives you the opportunity to add more internal links to your piece, which is great for SEO.

But you could also link to videos on your YouTube channel, for example. Or even better, embed those videos inside your blog posts. This increases the time that your audience spends on the page, which, again, tells Google that your content is relevant, interesting, and trustworthy.

Common Mistakes with your WordPress SEO for Blog Posts

Please please please don’t spend way too long trying to keep the Yoast SEO traffic light system happy. The plugin is there to help you and remind you of the things you could improve when it comes to SEO. But if you follow the tips in this blog post and have them at the back of your mind while you’re structuring and writing your blog post, optimising it shouldn’t take you more than 20-30 minutes.

And on that note, here are a couple of other SEO for your WordPress Blog mistakes that are worth calling out.

• Spending too long on keyword research. This doesn’t have to be complicated! Use handy tools like KWFinder, Answer the public, or Keywords Everywhere to help you.
• Focusing on search rather than users. We mentioned this quite a few times throughout this blog post, but this is important. You don’t want to stick words in for the sake of it because your readers will see through it and will disengage from your content and, as a result, from you as a brand. So always make sure your keywords are included organically and naturally in the text – they need to sound like they belong there. And if you’ve chosen your keyword and your topic right, they will! 

If you want to find out more about all this, head over to our blog post, The Biggest SEO Mistakes You’re Making (And What to Do Instead).

Ready to take your SEO to the Next Level? 

The benefits of good SEO are clear – it helps you get more leads and sales organically, without having to spend so much time on social media or fork out a load of money for ads. 

But often, business owners find SEO a bit too complicated, which is why we’ve created our SEO Starter Pack. This pack is aimed at complete beginners and will teach you exactly how to optimise your website for better search engine rankings. 

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post WordPress SEO For Blogging – How to Optimise Your WordPress Blog Posts appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Wait, what does that even mean? And do you need to care?

Writing copy for SEO means creating content that helps your ideal customers find you through Internet searches. So yes, you do need to care.

And sorry if that’s not quite what you wanted to hear. We know that a lot of business owners get really overwhelmed by SEO and end up overcomplicating things unnecessarily and, frankly, can get it a bit wrong sometimes.

And we get that. It’s easy to buy into the fact that SEO is way too technical and complicated, but the great news is that we’re going to break it all down for you in a series of easy-to-follow steps that will help you become more strategic about the search terms you include in your copy. So you can get more people to find your awesome website!

And here’s the biggest secret we’re going to share with you today. Writing well for your readers and writing well for SEO are exactly the same thing! And if you remember this, and write copy with your readers in mind, chances are you’re going to get it right. Definitely more so than by stressing about the technical side of SEO.

So with that principle in mind, here are 8 tips to help you write website copy for SEO.

1. Start with keyword research

Doing some keyword research is crucial because it tells you what you should optimise your copy or content for. There is no point in you writing content about something no one ever searches for, right?

So you need to be clever and strategic about this.

Think about:

• What problems are your readers experiencing?
• What kind of things do you help with?
• And what do you want to be found for?

The key is to find out what your readers are looking for and focus on that.

But how do you find the search terms or keywords you need?

Well, there are plenty of free or low-cost keyword research tools that allow you to search for words and phrases. Some of them even give you the average number of monthly searches, so you can decide which terms are going to work best for your business.

Here are a few tools for you to try out:

• KWFinder
• Keywords everywhere
• Answer the public

Start by writing down a few words and phrases that relate to your products or services and then use the tools above to gather a list of relevant keywords. Once you have a few, prioritise them, starting with the most relevant ones to your business and the ones that are searched for the most.

It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. Promise!

And if you want to find out more about how each of the above tools works, head over to section two of our blog post, SEO For Beginners: The Ultimate Guide.

2. Section your page, using your keywords to guide you

So now that you’ve got your keywords, it’s time to start planning the content for your website. 

When you’re working on your web pages, you’ll want to break the content down into relevant chunks or sections, both visually (i.e. layout and presentation), but also in terms of how you organise the information to make it easy for your reader to follow. 

Use the keywords you’ve identified during the research to help you decide what these sections are going to be about. And our advice is that each section should talk about one thing and one thing only.

So let’s say you’re a book editor for non-fiction business authors. You’ve done some keyword research and on your book editing Service page you might have sections that look a bit like this:

1. Book editing for non-fiction business book authors.
2. How does my business book editing service work?
3. How much does non-fiction editing cost?
4. What’s included within my book editing service?
5. FAQ about my non-fiction book editing service.
6. People who have loved my book editing service! (A testimonials/case study section).

Now, the whole Service page is obviously about your book editing service, but each section covers a specific topic. And these are all keywords!

So as you can see from the example, the titles of each section not only answer specific questions that your prospective clients are likely to have. But they also include the actual search terms that people would type into Google when looking for a book editor.

Can you see how writing for your readers and writing for SEO are actually one and the same?

So when you decide how to break down your page and how to title each section, let the keywords guide you, and don’t forget to optimise the title of each section – i.e. include your keywords in there!

Want an extra tip for writing Service pages? Always create a separate Service page for each of your services! If you’re a book editor who also edits school books and materials, have a separate Service page for that and break it down into relevant sections that answer your clients’ questions.

3. Fill out each section and go as in-depth as you can

Now that you’ve decided how to break down the information you want to cover and how to structure your page, it’s time to fill in each of the sections. But how exactly do you write copy with SEO in mind?

Well, it’s simple.

You write with the mindset of serving your ideal customers or clients. Put yourself in their shoes and focus on what they’ll want to know about your service.

Remember that the things you take for granted because you’ve been working in this space for years and years are probably completely new territory for your clients! Your job as the business owner is to break the information down in an easy, digestible way – without using jargon or fancy language.

Instead, use plain English and avoid being too formal. Simply explain things as you would to someone in an email or over the phone. Just because this is your website and you’re publishing the information on the Internet, it doesn’t mean you suddenly need to sound like a robot!

In fact, this is a brilliant opportunity for you to give your prospective clients a flavour of what it’s like to work with you – of what you sound like in real life. Don’t miss it! And if you’d like to find out more about this, head over to our blog post, How to Nail Your Tone of Voice.

We often get asked how much information you should include in each section. And that depends. But our advice is to go to town with it! Add as much information as you can in order to answer your customers’ questions.

Ideally, your sections would look roughly the same (because visually, that gives your page a nice, balanced feel). So if you find that you have much longer sections, perhaps consider breaking them down further. Obviously with SEO and keywords in mind.

4. Optimise your URL

This is a very quick and easy step but one that a lot of business owners forget about, and it’s crucial for SEO. If you want your prospective customers to find you, add the main keyword you want to optimise your page for in your URL, i.e. your web page address.

So if you’re the book editor above, your book editing Service page URL might look something like this:

5. Optimise your images

Another step we see a lot of website owners miss when writing copy for SEO is optimising images. But that’s a really easy thing to do to tell Google what your content is all about.

So when you add images to your pages and blog posts, make sure you optimise them. You can do this by accessing the file properties and including your keywords in the image title and the Alt-Text of the image.

In case you’re not familiar with Alt-Text, this is a short bit of copy bit that’s used to improve the accessibility of your images. You can think of it as your chance to describe to someone who can’t see what’s in the image. This is important for SEO because this bit of text also helps the Google bots ‘see’ that image. They’re only algorithms so they can’t see images like us!

6. Use internal links

Internal links are links that you include in your content that send your users to other pages or articles on your own website.

Adding internal links to your website content is another step that works fantastically well for your readers as well as for SEO. And that’s exactly why we say that writing for SEO is as simple as writing with your readers in mind!

When you think about it, adding internal links to other relevant pages or blog posts that you’ve created helps your website visitors find more information they’re potentially interested in. You’re doing them a favour by directing them to content they might want to consume, much like we do in our blog posts. Adding internal links to your content is basically good customer service!

But internal links work really well from an SEO perspective too. They tell the search engines how your website pages relate and link to each other. Remember that Google isn’t a person. Algorithms trawl through your content following lines of code. And internal links are just that, so they help the search engines rank your website better.

Plus, when you add internal links to your content, you’re also encouraging your readers to spend more time on your website. Without getting too technical, this is called dwell time. The higher it is, the more Google sees your website as trustworthy and interesting.

Of course, you don’t want to overdo it, so don’t add links that aren’t relevant. Think about your readers and what they might want to find out more about and point them in the right direction by including relevant internal links only. Focus on providing a great user experience, and you’ll get SEO brownie points too.

7. Optimise your title tag

The title tag is basically your web page title. It’s the clickable headline that gets displayed when you do a search on Google. It’s what tells you what the web page is all about. Plus, it makes your reader decide whether they want to go ahead and click on your content.

You probably know the drill by now, but our recommendation is to include the keyword you want to optimise your page for in the title tag. That makes it nice and easy for your readers to understand what your page is all about and (you guessed it) it’s great for SEO too.

So in the example of our book editor above, the title tag for their book editing Service page could be ‘Non-fiction book editing in Manchester’ or ‘Affordable business book editing in London’. Whatever applies. Just make sure the title tag describes the content of your page and contains a keyword you identified when doing research.

8. Write a compelling meta description that makes people click!

And finally, don’t forget to write your meta description. This is the text that displays underneath the clickable headline when you get search results through Google.

If you think about your own behaviour as a user, when you do an Internet search, you’ll quickly scan through the results of the first page of Google. And it’s only when you find a title that fits the bill (see why the title tag is important?) that you might then go and read the 3-4 lines of text that sit underneath.

That’s the meta description.

And you want to use that wisely. So, once again, write with your reader and with SEO in mind.

• Describe (succinctly) what that web page is all about. What is the key message? What’s the reason for that page to exist?
• Write something compelling. Tap into your readers’ curiosity, tease the content, and make it sound interesting and enticing. Remember, this is the bit of text that will help people decide whether they want to click on the page!
• Include the keyword you want to optimise your page for. So if you went for ‘business book editing’, that’s what you want to include in your meta description.

Again, if you’re on WordPress and have the Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily populate the Meta description section at the bottom of the page. The plugin has a handy visual traffic light system, which even tells you when you’ve hit the ideal length of text for your meta description.

Would you like more help with writing for SEO?

And there you have it. 8 easy steps you can follow to write copy with SEO in mind. If you need any more help visit our blog post, The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

Or you can check out our SEO starter pack, which gives you everything you need you get your website ranking.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post How to Write Website Copy for SEO  appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

The dreaded acronym.

The ‘dark art’ that has the power to help you rank high on Google but that nearly every website owner we know seems to dread.

Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t need to be complicated. When broken down into actionable tips and steps and done right, it’s a brilliant strategy to help your ideal customers or clients find you online.

And yet, we see a lot of businesses dip their toes into the murky SEO waters and get things a bit wrong. So here are the 9 biggest SEO mistakes we see people make and how to fix them to make sure you get the results you want.

1. Not doing any keyword research

The first mistake you might not even know you’re making is not doing any keyword research.

That’s right, keyword research is a thing. And it’s definitely a step you don’t want to miss out on.

And if you have, no need to beat yourself up because you’re most definitely not alone. Most business owners do exactly the same because they assume they know exactly what people are searching for online.

And you know what they say about assumptions, don’t you?

For example, if you sell a funky pair of glasses that block blue light to help people fall asleep easier and faster at night, you might be tempted to create a lot of content around ‘blue light exposure’ or ‘blue light glasses’. And that’s great for those customers who already know about your product and its benefits.

But do you know what could also lead to your website? The search term ‘how to sleep better at night’. Because this is something people actually search for. And if you haven’t used it in your website content, you may be missing out on opportunities to be found, to receive an enquiry in your inbox or over the phone, and to make a sale!

And that’s not cool, right?

Plus, if you don’t do your keyword research, you’ll also miss out on loads of extra ideas for content.

So what should you do instead?

Learn how to do some basic keyword research

Keyword research, much like SEO in general, doesn’t need to be complicated. You can keep it super simple and use free tools to start with.

Remember – all you’re trying to do is to work out what your ideal clients actually search for when they go on Google. And once you know what those phrases are, you can create content that answers their questions.

That turns your website into something that’s relevant, useful, and interesting for your readers, but it also gives them more chances of finding your business online.

So how do you go about doing keyword research?

Here are a few tools that can help you:

• Google. Have you ever paid attention to the ‘People also ask’ and ‘Related searches’ sections on the Google results pages? They’re full of interesting terms that real people type or speak into the search engines.
• Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that gives you trend data and search volumes for the keywords you input. It helps you find out if a search term is popular. And if it isn’t, the tool gives you related keywords and ‘People also search for’ suggestions you can use instead.
• Answer the public gives you visual diagrams full of real questions that people ask when searching for a particular term. It’s really cool – you should try it out if you haven’t already!
• KWFinder is a paid-for tool that tells you exactly how many times a particular keyword is searched for every month. If your keyword is very competitive (i.e. a lot of content already exists and ranks well for that keyword) your chances of ranking aren’t the greatest. So the trick is to find keywords that lots of people search for but that not many other content creators are already using.

Do give keyword research a go. It will definitely change the way you create content!

2. Focusing on one keyword

Another mistake we see a lot of website owners make is to use the same keyword across various pages or pieces of content on your website. 

Say, for example, that you optimised your Homepage for ‘window repairs Liverpool’. You probably went for that keyword because it’s specific to what you do and it includes your location. Perfect.

But you definitely don’t want to use the exact same keyword for your About page, all your Service pages, and 5 of your blog posts. Right?

Unfortunately, putting all your eggs in one basket and trying to rank for that one keyword won’t solve all your problems. Because chances are your competitors will also try and rank for that exact keyword, so Google will have to look at other factors when deciding which results to display first.

Plus, what happens if that keyword isn’t specific enough? For example, while ‘window repairs Liverpool’ is a term people search for, if someone’s looking to have their car window fixed, your website might not be the right fit for them.

People search for specific solutions to their problems. So, depending on what types of services you offer, if you’re not optimising any of your content for ‘double glazing window repairs’ or ‘door window repairs’, for example, you might be missing out on opportunities.

So what should you do instead?

Optimise your content for a variety of relevant keywords

Mix things up and vary your keywords. If you’ve done your keyword research (see how it’s paying off already?), you’ll now have a range of keywords your ideal customers or clients search for, which means you don’t have to use the same one over and over.

If you’ve already used ‘window repairs Liverpool’, you could go with:

• UPVC window repairs Liverpool.
• Sash window repairs Liverpool near me.
• Window lock repairs Liverpool area.

D’you see where we’re going with this?

These are all real phrases people search into Google, and if they’re relevant to your business, they make great choices for your Service pages or your blog content.

By adding more related and relevant keywords into the mix, you give yourself more chances of being found for the products or services you offer.

3. Not optimising your content  

Do you optimise each piece of content you publish on your website? And by that, we mean all your web pages and all your blog posts?

If you don’t, we’ve got bad news for you.

You’re missing out!

Unfortunately, producing a huge amount of content isn’t enough. It’s a great idea and practice for sure. But you need to follow it through by optimising it all.

Why?

Because Google ranks content by using bots and algorithms, and it won’t know what your content is about unless you give it a little helping hand.

And if Google can’t find your website because you haven’t optimised your content, how do you expect your ideal customers or clients to find your business?

So what should you do instead?

Make sure your content is optimised for search

Let’s be honest. Optimisation will add some time to your content creation efforts (we’d say 20-30 minutes per piece of content).

But it’s worth doing. Because it makes the difference between your parents and best friend being the only ones reading your blog (don’t worry, we’ve all been there!) and your ideal customers finding your business on Google.

So once you’ve strategically picked your keywords (again, can you see why keyword research is so important!) include them in the following:

• Page or blog title.
• Meta description.
• URL for the page or blog post.
• Sub-headings.
• Alt-text for the images you added to that piece of content.

This gives Google better chances of understanding exactly what your content is all about and returning it to the search engine result pages. And if you want to know exactly how to do this, check out our blog post – how to optimise your blog posts for search engines.

4. Failing to niche down your content

Another mistake we see a lot of website owners make is to fall into the trap of being too generic. This is the opposite of mistake number 2, where we talked about trying to rank for just one keyword. 

As it turns out, trying to rank for too many keywords (especially if they span over a range of loosely-related topics) isn’t great either.

If you do that, you may not only confuse your audience but also dilute your main product or service. People like to work with specialists and experts. They like to know there’s one or a few core things you sell and are really really good at. 

If you’re a financial advisor specialising in mortgages, you might confuse your audience if you start comparing credit cards or giving generic advice on money-saving.

So what should you do instead?

Choose a niche or topic and go in-depth with it

Instead of focusing on too many topics, choose one topic or a few key ones that relate to your business and go to town on them.

Say, for example, that you want to be known as the local go-to person who helps people with their mortgage. ‘Help with mortgage’ is a broad topic. But when you start breaking it all down and looking at the questions your ideal clients ask, there is a lot of content you could create on this topic.

For instance:

• How to get help with mortgage payments if you’re temporarily unemployed.
• Charities that offer help with mortgage payments.
• Best resources to help with your mortgage when you’ve been made redundant.

And so on.

Once you’ve picked your topic, aim to make it the best resource on the internet for your niche, and you really can’t go wrong.

5. Not having enough website copy

Long-winded web pages full of lines and lines of text are hard and boring to read, right?

True.

But the opposite is also true.

If your core web pages (your Homepage, your About page, and Product or Service pages) don’t have enough content, that could also set you back. Having too little content means your website doesn’t provide a great deal of information to your audience. So will they feel confident enough to get in touch with an enquiry?

Also, not having enough web copy might impact your SEO efforts. Remember when we said that Google doesn’t know what your content is about unless you tell it?

Your website should act as a salesperson for your business – it’s not just the equivalent of a pretty window or a digital business card with hardly any details on it!

So what should you do instead?

Include plenty of relevant information in your content

Your website content should provide value. Its job is to answer your customers’ key questions and help them decide whether they’re ready to go ahead and buy from you.

So, instead of shying away from content, include enough information in the core pages of your website to give your readers what they’re looking for.

Pricing, for example, is one of the main questions your readers might have when browsing your website. Knowing that your product or service is within their budget (or how much it stretches it by) will help them make a decision as to whether get in touch with you or not.

We see a lot of business owners who don’t include their prices. And often that’s because they offer bespoke services and prices vary. But you could always give your ideal clients a ball-park figure. After all, someone who has no idea of how much working with you will cost may be too embarrassed to pick up the phone and ask. And you might lose them as prospective clients.

So don’t be that business! Make sure you always add enough information to your website in order for your ideal clients to make a decision. (And don’t forget to optimise those pages for SEO!) If you’re a service-based business, you can check out exactly what to put on your service page here.

6. Having a slow website 

Here’s one mistake that a lot of people don’t even know they’re making – having a slow website and not doing anything about it.

Why is a slow website even a problem?

Because us internet users expect websites to load quickly. Let’s be honest – we have little patience, and we don’t like waiting around.

But it’s not just that. It’s also a trust issue. If a website takes ages to load, we start thinking there must be something wrong with it or that it must be somehow ‘dodgy’.

And unless you’re a die-hard fan of that brand, what will you do?

Press the back button and go somewhere else.

In other words, if your website is too slow, it may be costing you clients. And to add insult to injury, Google knows if your website isn’t performing too well, which means you have fewer chances of ranking well in the search engine result pages.

So what should you do instead?

Check and improve your page load speed

You can easily check your website’s page load speed with a free tool called GTmetrix.

If you find your website is a little on the slow side, check your plugins. Are there any you no longer need or use? Make sure you deactivate and remove any plugins that aren’t necessary, as having too many will slow your website right down.

Also, don’t forget to compress and optimise all your images by using a tool like TinyPNG.

If you want to find out more about why compressing images is important for SEO, head over to our blog post SEO for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide.

7. Only focusing on on-page-SEO

Have you ever come across the phrases ‘on-page SEO’ or ‘on-site SEO’?

It’s not complicated, promise!

Chances are if you’ve been following our simple SEO advice, you’ve already been doing it. On-page SEO is about optimising your web pages and blog posts to help your website rank higher in search engine results. You do this by including the keyword you want to be found for in your headlines, meta descriptions, URLs, etc., as we already covered under mistake number 3 of this article.

On-page SEO is brilliant!

But there’s another side to the coin, and it’s called ‘off-page SEO’. Following this practice means you strategically spend time and effort to ensure that other reputable websites in your industry and niche link back to your content. Off-page SEO can be extremely helpful and boost your rankings like nothing else.

Because the truth is, there’s only so much you can do on your website alone. Google needs signals from other websites too.

So what should you do instead?

Focus on off-page SEO too

If you want your website to be found online, you need a strategy for ‘off-page SEO’ or ‘off-site SEO’ too.

To encourage other websites to link back to your own website, create helpful content like blog articles, videos, PDFs, reviews, or case studies that others will want to share on social media or link to from their own content.

Often, this isn’t something that ‘just happens’. You’d be very lucky if it does! Having an off-page SEO strategy means you might need to reach out to customers or clients, suppliers or other businesses you work with, and even online authorities or influencers whose audiences could benefit from consuming your content.

Guest posting is another great off-page SEO strategy. Have you got some wisdom to share that a fellow website owner would want to publish on their website? Perhaps you could be a guest on a podcast show? Or have you ever thought about pitching to an online magazine or publication?

There are lots of ways for other websites to link back to yours, which is why we recommend you include off-site SEO in your marketing strategy and come up with a plan to make it happen.

8. Not monitoring your analytics

Another mistake we see website owners make all the time is not monitoring their analytics. If you don’t do this, it means you don’t have a clear idea of what your audience is interested in.

And when you don’t know what content performs well on your website, you might end up creating more of the content that no one wants to read (sorry!). And surely you don’t want to spend time or money sharing something that your clients aren’t interested in, right? That’s a total waste!

Plus, the flip side is also true. If you don’t know what type of content on your website attracts your readers, you might actually miss opportunities to create more of that.

In short, not checking your analytics can really hinder your content strategy. Because unless you know what needs improving, you’ll never be able to do things differently.

So what should you do instead?

Check your analytics and act on the information

All the data you need is right there at your fingertips! All you have to do is check it instead of taking a stab in the dark when it comes to your content creation efforts.

By installing Google Analytics or the Google Search Console on your website you can get in the habit of analysing your website traffic. Check who visits your website, how they found you, what content they tend to consume the most, and how they behave when they’re on your site.

Once you have all this information, you can make better decisions around what content to create next and give yourself better chances of ranking higher in the search engine result pages.

9. Putting your head in the sand 

Completely ignoring SEO is easily done. We know a lot of business owners who’d rather do just that. Because SEO seems extremely technical and complicated to understand or too expensive to outsource. (But it really isn’t!)

You may have also heard on the grapevine (from social media, colleagues, or business associates, etc.) that SEO is dead.

It isn’t.

SEO practices have definitely changed over the last decade. Tactics that used to work 10-15 years ago don’t work anymore. And that’s simply because there’s so much more competition online and because Google keeps us online business owners on our toes by continuously refining and improving its algorithms.

SEO is definitely not dead. In fact, it’s vital for your business.

If you want to be found online, you need to stop putting your head in the sand and pay SEO the attention it deserves. Because ignoring SEO would be the equivalent of setting up a physical shop in the middle of nowhere. How do you expect your ideal customers to find your business if you don’t tell them you’re there?

So what should you do instead?

Buy our SEO Starter Pack 

Our SEO Starter Pack includes a video library that walks you through what you need to know about SEO step-by-step, with planners, checklists, and loads of other bonuses.

So here’s what you can expect when you buy the SEO Starter Pack:

• It includes everything you need to know about getting started with SEO in one place. No more scouring the internet and getting confused by conflicting information!
• It contains easy-to-follow, short lessons aimed at non-techies. We won’t bore you death with one long lesson or bamboozle you with technical jargon. That’s just not us at all!
• The pack teaches you the key parts of SEO – the ones with the biggest impact on your business to help you drive more traffic to your website.

The SEO Starter Pack is now available for $97.00+VAT. You can order it here and access everything right away. So what are you waiting for? Are you ready to use SEO to make a difference in your business?

Martin & Lyndsay

The post The Biggest SEO Mistakes You’re Making (And What to Do Instead)  appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Does the term ‘Search Engine Optimisation‘ make you break out in a sweat?

Well, we’ve got good news for you.

We can help.

SEO doesn’t need to be scary or confusing. When broken down into meaningful chunks of information and explained in plain English, SEO can be easy and accessible.

That’s how we like to see it anyway. This is why we’ve created this SEO Tips for Beginners Guide to help you optimise your own website for search.

So if you’re just getting started with SEO and don’t have loads of technical knowledge, this beginners’ guide to SEO is perfect for you. We’ve kept things simple and avoided including over-technical points that might just overwhelm you and make you want to scream. We’re nice like that.

The article is broken down into easy-to-consume sections to help you get going with optimising your website. We recommend you focus on each aspect at a time before moving on to the next, and we promise it’ll be easy enough. And worth it!

We’ve split this blog post into a few handy sections for you:

1. Tracking your website traffic.
2. Basic keyword research.
3. Main SEO considerations for your website
4. Technical SEO (don’t worry – technical doesn’t mean complicated! Not in our book anyway!)
5. Website pages.
6. Blog articles.
7. Website images.

So, are you ready to go?

1. Tracking your website traffic

How do you know if you’re doing well if you have no idea where you are right now?

Before you get going with your website SEO, you need to figure out what your starting point is. Let’s call this tracking your website traffic. And all it is is a way of monitoring the number of visitors to your website.

Why does it matter?

Because it helps you understand your existing and prospective customers and how they interact with your website. For example, what pages or blog posts are the most read on your website? Where do your visitors spend most of their time when on your website?

This is invaluable information for you because it tells you what works and what doesn’t. And once you know this, you can do more of what serves you well and tweak and change what doesn’t.

So, before you start your SEO efforts, track your traffic. Create some sort of starting point view or baseline that you can refer back to once you’ve gone through each of the sections in this beginners’ guide to SEO. By measuring your traffic before you get started and then after implementing the strategies in this blog post, you’ll be able to measure how effective your efforts have been.

So how do you measure your website traffic?

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic free web analytics tool that helps you analyse your website traffic. It lets you see who visits your website, how they found you, what content they tend to consume the most, and how they behave when they’re on your site.

Pretty handy, right?

Without getting too technical, let’s just say that the tool works by placing several lines of tracking code into your website. But there’s some good news here.

You don’t need to worry about any of that!

Once you create an account and link it to your website, you’ll be able to access easy-to-read reports that will give you great insight into how your users interact with your website.

If you want to find out more about the tool, Google has a great free course on how to get started with Google Analytics.

Google Search Console

Another similar tool is Google Search Console. It’s a free service that gives you access to information about your website performance and your users.

Compared to Google Analytics, Google Search Console gives you more internal information. For example, things like who is linking to your website, or which queries your website is appearing in the search results for. It also flags any problems with your website that might be holding you back from ranking better.

Signing up is free and easy, and you can read more information on getting started with the Google Search Console here.

Google page speed

Google page speed is another great tool to help you check how quickly your website loads, or your website load time.

This is an important metric when it comes to SEO – the quicker your website loads, the better. The recommendation is a page load time of under 2 seconds, but the faster the better.

Why does it matter?

Because as you know by being one yourself, internet users have little patience. And if a page takes around 3 or more seconds to load, chances are your visitors may start doubting the trustworthiness of your website.

And when they lose trust, they click the back button and go looking for something else.

You can easily test your page speed with a free tool called GTmetrix. It gives you a performance report for your website and highlights any issues you might have, so you know what to look into and improve.

If you want to know more about checking your rankings, you can always check out our blog post – 5 ways to check your search rankings. 

So now that you have a baseline and know exactly where you stand, it’s time to pull your sleeves up and get your teeth into the first meaty bit of SEO for beginners – keyword research.

2. Basic keyword research

Okay, we’ll admit this doesn’t sound very exciting. But actually, it’s not as bad as you think!

So what is keyword research, and why does it matter?

Keyword research is the process by which you look for terms and phrases that people search for on the internet. This exercise is an important step for SEO because once you have those terms and phrases at hand, you can strategically include them in your content.

In other words, this exercise allows you to create content around topics that interest your ideal clients. If you sell holiday packages to Iceland, you wouldn’t dream of writing about ‘how to fill in your tax return’, would you?

Hopefully not. Because that wouldn’t help your business at all.

But keyword research would tell you that people actually look for terms such as:

• Iceland holidays 2021.
• Iceland holidays Northern lights.
• Cheap holidays to Iceland.
• Best Iceland package deals.

You get the gist.

Once you know exactly what terms and phrases people search for, you can produce content around these topics and increase your chances of ranking higher in the search engine results.

Notice that although this process is called keyword research, I talked about terms and phrases. This is because when we run a search on Google we don’t just look for the word ‘Iceland’. That wouldn’t give us what we want at all! The term is too broad and generic, and the results would be useless.

Instead, we type or ask actual questions. These chunks of words are known as longtail keywords, and they help us narrow down our search results.

So how can you use this to your advantage? Where do you find the longtail keywords to include in your website content?

Here are a few tools that might come in handy…

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that helps you with keyword research, and it’s a great tool to start with. Once you install it, it shows you:

• Trend data and search volumes for that keyword.
• Related keywords to the search term you selected.
• ‘People also search for’ suggestions.

A paid-for version is also available if you want more information on monthly searches and competitor analysis, for example. But if you’re just getting started with SEO and want to keep things simple, the free version will do the trick for you.

Answer the public

Answer the public is another awesome keyword tool that helps you visualise search questions through an image called search cloud. Simply enter your topic, and the tool produces a visual diagram full of real questions that people have asked when searching for that term.

Once you decide on a topic for a blog post, for example, you can use the information from the search cloud to decide what to cover in each individual sub-sections. It’s free, easy to use, and a fantastic way to keep things super simple when it comes to SEO. Answer the public is free with an option to upgrade for businesses who need to run multiple keyword searches per month.

KWFinder

KWFinder is a paid-for tool that allows you to find the best longtail keywords to include in your content.

You can even see how competitive and profitable keywords are. What you want is to find keywords that lots of people search for but that not many other content creators are already using.

More competition means fewer chances for you to be found online. But if you do your homework and pick keywords that aren’t overused but still searched for on a regular basis, then you’re winning.

KWFinder offers affordable plans depending on the number of keyword searches per month you need and also has a FREE 10-day trial.

3. Optimising your website for SEO

Okay, so you’ve got your keywords. Now how do you go about optimising your website? Whether you’re planning or re-designing your website, here are 3 activities I’d recommend:

• Plan your website structure.
• Focus on niche topics.
• Limit the content on your Homepage.

So what does it all mean?

Plan your site structure

Have you thought about the way you plan to organise information on your website? For example, what will your users see from the main menu? Will you have sub-pages dropping down from under your main pages?

Making sure that your overall site structure is user-friendly and easy to navigate is important.

Why?

First of all, it tells your readers how and where to find information. But it also tells Google where your most important content is. Because Google isn’t a person – it crawls websites through bots, following links between various pieces of content. This is how it determines the relationship between different elements of your website.

So the way you structure your content (in pages and blog posts) can influence which content will rank highest in the search engines. If you don’t plan this through, your visitors might struggle to find what they’re looking for and leave your website too soon for your liking. This indirectly tells Google that your website isn’t user-friendly, and you don’t want that!

I recommend you take some time to plan it all out. And if you need more information on how to organise your site structure, check out our article: The Ultimate Guide to a Perfect Website.

Focus on niche topics

And no, this doesn’t mean you have to write about obscure topics no one knows anything about! Phew!

It’s quite the opposite, actually.

You want to write content that people search for.

So when researching keywords and planning content for your web pages or blog posts, narrow your topics down. Instead of being broad and generic, be specific and niche.

So in the example of our Iceland holiday provider, if you cater for family holidays, you might want to create content around:

• ‘Best family hotels in Iceland’.
• ‘How to make the most of Iceland with kids’.
• ‘Self-drive itineraries for Iceland with kids’.

People want specific answers to specific questions. And when you create specific content, you’re helping your ideal clients understand exactly what you do and how you help. This puts you in a better position to capture all those specific searches with longtail keywords.

Limit content on your Homepage

Writing content for your Homepage is a big job. And one that a lot of website owners get a bit wrong.

Why?

Because they tend to cram way too much information onto it. And that’s not what your Homepage needs to do for you.

Your Homepage isn’t the place to tell your visitors everything there is to know about you and your products or services.

Instead, think of it as the reception area of your website. Its job is to direct users where they need to go, quickly and efficiently. So don’t overload it. And don’t overwhelm your visitors with content.

You should then have dedicated pages set up for your products and services. And if you’re a service-based business – a page for each service where you go into detail.

If you want more tips on what to include in your Homepage, head over to our blog post: What You Should Put on Your Homepage to Increase Conversion.

4. Technical SEO tips for optimising your website

Although I promised this beginners’ guide to SEO didn’t need to be technical or complicated, there are a few key technical considerations that impact SEO.

And the ones I’d like to talk you through are:

• Improve your page speed.
• Ensure your website is responsive.
• Install an SSL certificate.

Improve your page speed

Did you know that your page speed affects your SEO efforts too?

But first thing first, what even is that?

Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your website takes to load. So when someone lands on your website, how long does it take for the information to appear on their screen?

You probably guessed that you want that number to be as small as possible. If the page takes too long to load, your visitors might hit the back button and leave. You don’t want that.

Plus, if your website is slow, you have less chance of ranking well in the search results.

So what can you do to improve your page speed?

• Only use plugins that are absolutely necessary. Too many plugins will slow your website down.
• Compress and optimise your images (more on that later).
• Keep redirects to a minimum. Every time you redirect your users to another page, you add to the overall waiting time.

Ensure your website is responsive

Does your website look good on mobile and tablet?

With more and more users accessing content on their smartphones or tablets, your website needs to look good no matter what device your visitors are using. And that’s exactly what a responsive website is. One where the layout is easy for your visitors to read and navigate.

This gives your readers a better user experience, and when someone finds your website easy and enjoyable to be on, naturally, they’ll want to spend more time on it. And without getting into too many details, that’s a great indicator for Google too.

So if you want to boost your chances of ranking well in the search results, think about design and user experience too.

Install an SSL certificate

Before you run for the hills at the use of yet another acronym, let us explain.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. But you don’t need to get bogged down into all that.

All you need to know is that SSL protects your website data. It turns your website into a secure environment – for you and for your prospective clients. Because without one, there’s a risk your visitors’ personal data might get stolen. Plus, an SSL certificate protects your website too – from phishing scams, data breaches, etc.

And what’s that got to do with SEO, I hear you ask?

Well, Google and other search engines tend to favour websites that they perceive as secure. And without an SSL certificate, your website will be flagged as ‘non-secure’.

If you’re not sure whether you have an SSL certificate or not, finding out is super easy. Simply check whether your website URL shows as http (no SSL) or https (that means you’ve got SSL!).

To get an SSL certificate for your website (in case you don’t have one) simply contact your host. Most reputable WordPress hosting companies offer one for free and can show you what to do to turn yours on.

5. Your website pages

So now that we’ve looked at some of the work you need to do around the structure and layout of your website, it’s time to look at your website pages.

By these I mean, your About page, your Service or Product pages, your Contact Us page, etc. So what kind of things do you need to pay attention to when it comes to optimising your website pages for search?

Title tags

A title tag (or page title or HTML title) specifies the title of your website page.

But where does that go?

When you do a search on Google, the title tag is the clickable headline that tells you what the page is all about. They help us make that initial decision as to whether we want to click on a link or not.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of business owners who forget to attach meaningful title tags for their web pages.

Please don’t be one of them!

Use the title tag to say what the page is all about and include the keywords you found during your research. Make them relevant to your niche and business, and, if applicable, to your location.

For example, if you’re an accountant in Manchester, the title tag for one of your Service pages might read, ‘Tax return for small business owners in Manchester’. Or something along those lines. It’s niche and specific. And says what it does on the tin.

Meta descriptions

The meta description is the text that displays underneath the clickable headline when you get results through Google.

Why does it matter?

Now, think about your own behaviour as a user. When you do a search, you quickly scan through the results, and if something looks interesting and relevant, you might go and read the 3-4 lines of text that sit underneath. Just to make sure you want to click on that.

That’s the meta description.

Just like with title tags, a lot of website owners forget to fill that in. So don’t make that mistake.

Use those 3-4 lines of text to tell the reader exactly what the page is about. You want to entice them to read.

If you want more detail, check out our blog post on how to optimise your blog posts.

Headings

Hopefully, your web pages aren’t just a great wall of text, right?

They have lovely sections and sub-sections that guide your readers through the content of the page.

Great.

Those sections have headings. And you probably know the drill by now – make sure you pick meaningful headings.

The headings on your pages tell your readers what each section is all about. But they help with SEO too, so make sure you include your keywords in there.

Just a quick word of advice. When you do include keywords in your headings, try and make them look organic and natural. Don’t force it. If a keyword doesn’t fit that section, it doesn’t. The last thing you want is for your page content to read a bit odd and put your prospective clients off.

For more information on how to create an awesome service page for your website, head over to our article, The 9 Essentials of a High-converting Service page.

6. Your blog articles

Everything we talked about in the context of web pages and including relevant keywords applies to blog posts too.

So, for example, if you want to optimise a blog post for ‘portrait photographer in greater Manchester’, include that long-tail keyword in:

• The blog title.
• The Alt Text of your images (more on that later).
• Your sub-headings.
• The main text of your blog article.

But when it comes to blog posts, a few other things are worth thinking about, including:

• Word count.
• Internal links.
• Sub-headings.

Word count

Now, this might not sound like great news. But it’s the truth, so here it goes.

Short 200-word articles don’t cut it with Google anymore.

This used to be the case 10-15 years ago, but not anymore.

Why?

Because Google’s job is to serve its users. When you do a search on Google, you want to see great and relevant content. You don’t want to sift through links and links just to find that none of them answer your questions. Because that’s frustrating, right?

But longer and more in-depth pieces (just like this one) probably have the answers you’re looking for.

And let’s face it – competition on the internet is huge. Lots of companies and business owners just like you produce loads of content on a daily basis. And if you want your business and your content to stand out, in-depth and detailed pieces of content are the way to do it.

HubSpot did some research around this too. Finding that 50 of their most-read blog posts in 2019…yielded an average word count of 2,330. 

So when writing blog articles, we recommend at least 1,200 words or more. This might sound hard to do, especially if you’re not too keen on writing.

So pick topics you know about and that your prospective customers want to read about. Show off your knowledge and expertise, and you’ll start to build trust with your readers while encouraging them to spend more time on your website. This tells Google that your website is worth visiting and gives you better chances of ranking higher in the search results.

If you need some inspiration around what content to create, head over to our article, How to Plan 50 Pieces of Content in 30 Minutes.

Internal links

Internal links are links that you include in your own blog post that send your users to other pages or articles on your own website.

Why do they matter?

Because they tell both Google and your readers how your content links together. Remember that Google isn’t a person! Google reads your content through bots – they don’t see your website the way we do. They read lines and lines of code. And internal links help search engines understand how various bits of information on your website relate to each other.

Plus, internal links are great for user experience. By linking to existing content you’re giving your readers more information. But you’re also inviting them to spend more time on your website. This is called dwell time, and the higher it is, the more Google sees your website as trustworthy and interesting.

So as you write your content, think about ways to organically include links to other relevant pages or articles you created before. You’ll notice that we’ve done this in this article too!

Sub-headings

When writing blog posts (and especially longer pieces), it’s always a good idea to break the information down into sections and paragraphs.

A sub-heading is the bit of text that introduces a new section of your blog post. In WordPress, you can format your sub-headings as Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, etc, depending on how many sections and sub-sections you have.

Each of your sub-headings gives you a chance to include your relevant keywords, which (you guessed!) helps your SEO efforts.

So once again, look at the list of longtail keywords you found while doing your research and include them organically in your sub-headings. Be creative but don’t force it! If you use the same exact keyword in each of your sub-headings, that might look a bit odd to your readers!

For more information on how to write killer blog posts, head over to our article, How to Write a Blog Post that People Will Actually Read.

7. Website images

And last but not least, a few words on images. Your website visitors don’t expect to come to your website and just read text. Imagine how boring that would be! Images play an important part in your website user experience and SEO efforts.

You’ll use a few on your website pages and possibly even more in your blog posts. Because remember – your readers don’t want to see walls and walls of text with no interruptions! Think about their visual experience too by leaving plenty of white space on the page (to let the text ‘breathe’) and by adding relevant pictures.

I always recommend you use plenty of photographs of yourself and your team if you have one. But if you need more images and pictures for your web pages or your blog posts, you can find plenty of free or paid-for stock pics on websites like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.

Re-sizing your images

Before adding images to your website, you should always re-size them. If your images are too big, they might slow down your website and impact your page speed.

For example, images on this blog post are no bigger than 1200px wide. There’s no reason for them to be huge (like 4000px).

You’ll also need to compress your images so they load quicker. To do that, you can use a free online tool called tinypng. This will help you compress your images without losing any quality.

Optimising your images

Whether you add images to your Homepage, your Service or Product pages, or your blog posts, don’t miss the chance to optimise them. You can do this by accessing the file properties and including your keywords in the image title and the Alt-Text of the image.

The Alt-Text is a bit of copy that’s used to improve the accessibility of your images. You can think of it as a chance to describe to someone who can’t see what’s in the image.

But this bit of text also helps Google bots ‘see’ that image. Because the only way they can do that is through text, it’s important you include your relevant keywords in there too. Doing this gives tells Google that a particular piece of content is relevant for someone searching for that term.

What Now? Grab the SEO Starter Pack!

And there you have it – the Ultimate SEO Tips for Beginners Guide.

We hope you enjoyed our SEO for beginners tips, but if you want to really invest in SEO, then check out our SEO Starter Pack. Perfect for non-techie business owners, it’s a practical, easy-to-understand bundle of resources to help you get higher search rankings and more website traffic.

The SEO Starter Pack includes:

• a video library that walks you through how to do SEO step-by-step,
• a comprehensive SEO checklist for every web page or blog post you create,
• keyword research training,
• an interactive SEO planner,
• and lots of added bonuses too!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post SEO For Beginners: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Or does it feel like you’re getting okay amounts of website traffic, but you want to do much better?

You’re not alone. Many business owners struggle to get traffic to their website, and it can be hugely deflating.

You’ve got stuff to sell, after all. Amazing stuff. Stuff that people want to buy, you just need those people to pay attention.

Luckily, there’s an easy way for you to get more website traffic.

In fact, there are 10 easy ways (because we’re generous like that).

In this blog post, we’re going to go through 10 ways you can increase your website traffic. By the end of the post, you’ll have all the information you need to boost your traffic and search engine rankings.

Sound good? Read on…

First things first, what impacts website traffic?

There are so many things that impact website traffic (either negatively or positively). For ease, we’ve grouped these into four categories…

1. Content Marketing
2. Website Copy
3. Technical issues related to your website
4. Social shares

In this blog post, we’re going to break down each of these categories, telling you exactly how you can improve in each.

Let’s get crackin’

How To Use Content Marketing To Improve Website Traffic

Using content marketing, and particularly blogging, is a great way to rank on search engines and deliver more website traffic.

But, how many business owners start a blog and don’t see results? A lot, unfortunately. So below, we’re going through some ways you can get more traffic from your blog posts.

1. Make Sure Your Blog Post Titles Are Optimised

Do you know that super creative blog post title you came up with?

The one you’re really proud of?

Yeah, you might need to get rid of it.

Business owners often fail to optimise their blog post titles. Instead, they opt for quirky or creative titles (that no one on the planet searches for).

Imagine if I called this blog post, ‘Get more eyeballs on your website.’ Now, that’s nice and everything, but no one will search for that.

And, it could be confusing to the reader too. It may take them a second or two to grasp what you mean, and it doesn’t really sell the benefits of reading the blog post. It actually brings up the mental image of just some eyeballs, floating mid-air staring at a computer screen…weird.

How to optimise blog post titles

Choose a blog post title that people actually search for.

You have to make sure your blog post title tells the reader (and search engines) what the post is about. It’s also advisable you include your keywords. In the case of this article, the keyword is ‘How to increase website traffic’.

This way you’re more likely to get search engine rankings, and therefore, more website traffic. Simple.

If you want to read more about optimising your blog post, check out our SEO Checklist for Blog Posts

2. Make Your Blog Post Titles Interesting

Yeah we know, we just told you to make it clear to the reader and search engines what your blog post is about via the title. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it interesting.

When your blog post is shared across social media you want people to click on it.

So as long as you can include your keywords in there, and you explain what the article is about, the rest is up to you to make it enticing.

How to make your blog post titles interesting

We could’ve called this blog post ‘How to Improve Your Website Traffic’ but we added ‘in just 10 simple steps.’

The word ‘simple’ is a ‘power word’ that grabs people’s attention. Using power words like ‘simple’ or ‘now’ or ‘instantly’ really do work.

We go into more details about this in our blog post, ‘How to Write Blog Posts People Actually Want to Read’.

We guarantee if you nail the title, you’ll get way more clicks from social media.

Stop using just bland imagery or stock photos for your blog post images

Imagine, you’re scrolling on Twitter or Facebook. You move pretty fast, right? And you see the images below…

Would any make you stop?

Not really.

I actually think our brains have an automatic blocker for these sorts of images.

But what about these images…

You’re more likely to stop right?

That’s because these images are so much more eye-catching. And when they’re done consistently in the same style every single time, your audience will come to recognise these images. They’ll form part of your brand.

They also include the blog post title in the image too. This is good because the person on social media can easily spot the title and what the post is all about.

How to create the main image for your blog post

Now, we know that not everyone is a photoshop whizz.

But even using a simple image in Canva with some text overlaid and your logo can make a huge difference. And try to keep the same style and consistency for every single blog post image – one that reflects your brand.

3. If you’re not creating content already, do it!

It’s difficult to get search engine rankings if you don’t produce regular content. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s difficult.

But the more content you create (and the right kind of content) the more keywords you’ll rank for and the more traffic you’ll get to your website.

How to start with a business blog

A lot of business owners say they struggle for content ideas. Here’s one easy way to fix that – answer a question. What are the most common questions you get about your business?

Write these down and use them as ideas for your content. Chances are if your customers or prospects are asking those questions, lots of people are Googling them too!

Or you can download our content planner which will give you a ton of ideas for traffic-generating content!

How to Improve Your Website Copy For More Website Visitors

Website copy is often considered an after-thought by business owners who prefer to focus on what their website looks like. But NEWSFLASH! Google doesn’t care how pretty your website is! It cares about user-experience and, the words on the page.

That’s why your website copy is vital for higher rankings and, you guessed it, more website traffic. We’re going to go through some reasons

4. Make sure you have enough copy on your web pages

It’s not as simple as more words = higher search engine rankings. After all, if those words are complete gobbledygook that’s not going to rank.

However, business websites often have a lack of actual information. Ever been on a website and just can’t find the info you need? Yeah, we all have. This is not good for search engines or for your readers either. Both need a lot of information.

I’ve even seen a business owner trying to sell a 3K coaching package with just a paragraph of information. That’s not enough to rank on search (especially in a competitive market) and certainly not enough to give the reader the information they need to know about that service.

How to write an informative service page that ranks

Every service you offer should have its own dedicated web page. If you think you couldn’t possibly write that much about one service then break it down and talk about…

• the features and benefits of your service
• who it’s aimed at
• the process and how it works
• an FAQ
• testimonials/case studies.

You can begin to see how one service can easily take up an entire page.

The more quality, in-depth content you write about your services the more likely they’ll rank on Google.

A lot of people ask here ‘yes, but how many words do I need?’ Unfortunately, there isn’t that one special number. Just make sure you cover everything your reader will need to know. But for service-based businesses, in particular, I would expect to see 1000+ words on a page.

5. Your copy isn’t optimised

Just like your blog posts, your copy also has to be optimised. A lot of people use the phrase ‘you should write for your reader first and not search engines’.

But actually, search engines and your readers want the exact same thing – good, clear, in-depth copy that provides the reader with everything they need.

By optimising your copy, we’re not saying talk like a robot or stuff keywords everywhere, quite the opposite! Google is now sophisticated enough to see past that.

So we always advise, ‘write for your reader, but be mindful of search engines.’

How to optimise your website copy

To optimise your website copy, you should use your keywords NATURALLY throughout your copy. And don’t just use the same keyword, mix up the phrases that people search for. I.e. if you run a cleaning company in Manchester you could use ‘Cleaner in Manchester’, ‘Spring Cleaning’, ‘One-off clean’, ‘Weekly cleaner around Manchester’ etc.

It’s best if you do some keyword research to find out what people are searching for. We like to use a tool called SEM Rush. We pay for this monthly, but they do let you do a couple of searches for free, which is handy.

If you want to know more about keyword research (and how to check your rankings for free), check out this blog post: 5 Ways to Check Your Keyword Rankings

Finally, make sure you use clear language and make things obvious. As a book editor, if the title of one of your pages was ‘the pro plan’ that’s difficult to rank. But if you named it, ‘Book Editing for Non-Fiction Authors – The Pro Package ’ see the difference? Now you’ve got some keywords in there. Plus, it’s better for the reader too!

Technical Stuff that Impacts Rankings and Website Traffic

Sometimes it’s just some annoying technical stuff that can impact your website traffic. Luckily, we’ve gone through the most common traffic-halting technical issues, and we tell you how to fix them…

6. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly

This is one huge traffic stopper! You have to have a mobile-friendly website. Ever visited a website from your mobile and had to pinch at the corners of the screen to see everything. Ugh, it’s awful, isn’t it? And if your users don’t like it. Google certainly won’t like it either!

A whopping 60% of Google searches now take place on mobile. And if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, Google may penalise you in their search results.

How to do make sure your site is mobile-friendly

Firstly, to understand if your website is mobile-friendly across all devices, visit Google’s mobile-friendly checker. What you want to see is a big a-okay from Google that your site is mobile friendly. Like this…

If it isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll need to fix it. How to fix it depends on how your website is set up. You’ll either need to contact your web developer. Or if you’ve built your site yourself, you’ll need to fix it through the backend of your site. If you use a page builder such as Elementor, click on the little mobile icon in your editor and it will show you the mobile version of your site that you can edit.

7. Make sure your website loads quickly

If your website loads too slowly, then it will impact your search engine rankings. Google wants to give its users the best experience possible, so if your website won’t load quickly, they’re not going to show you in their search results.

In 2018, Google conducted some research which revealed that 53% of users will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

So even if people do find your snail-like website, they’re probably going to leave it before it even loads on their screen!

How to speed up your website…

Firstly, you can check how fast your website loads using a website like GT Metrix. It will also give you a more detailed overview of what is impacting your website speed. Now, for non-techies, this can look a bit like gobbledygook. So it may be best to send this info to your web developer if your page load speed is poor.

But there are things you can do, for example, every time you upload an image to your website make sure it’s compressed (i.e. no humongous!) You can use a website like Tiny PNG to do this – your image quality will remain the same but it will load much quicker.

If you’re really stuck and you’ve DIY’d your website – you can use a speed up service from somewhere like WP Fix It, to speed up your site.

8. Make your meta description and title tags irresistible

Title tags and meta descriptions aren’t visible on your website, but they are displayed in Google’s search results. The image below shows you exactly what I mean.

The problem is, people often let their content management system (CMS) automatically fill the title tag and meta description for them. The CMS will pull details from your page or blog post to create this information.

But that’s not the best way to do this. What you need to do is write something from scratch (it’ll take you five minutes) that entices the person using search engines. After all, you’re competing with the entire page for clicks, and you want people to choose you.

How to make your title tags and meta description enticing

Firstly, make sure your title tag includes your keywords (just don’t stuff them in, it looks spammy!) Keep it natural, and summarise what the page or article is about. In this instance, we’ve gone for…

Increase Your Website Traffic in Just 10 Simple Steps | Web Traffic

It’s best to separate any phrases with a pipe (|) as it looks neater.

For the meta description, this is where you need to appeal to the user. You want them to click on your website, so you need to think of a way to get them to do that. What are the main benefits if they click on that page and read the contents? What outcome will they receive? I’ve shown an example below from one of our blog posts.

How to Use Social Media to Get More Website Traffic

Using social media is a great way of getting traffic to your website. But you’ve got to do it right. You can’t just share a link to a page or post and expect people to visit your website. Find out how you can use social media to increase your website traffic below…

9. Promote Your Content (Properly!)

You create content and yet…you do very little in the way of promotion of your content. Maybe you share a basic link to your latest blog post or podcast episode over your social media channels. Unfortunately, that ain’t going to cut it.

If you want to get more eyeballs on your content (and by default, your website) then you have to promote that content. Some people even suggest spending as much time promoting the content as you do creating it. Eeeek!

How to promote your content to get more website traffic

Have you emailed your content to your email subscribers? Have you shared not just a link on social media but actual engaging posts about the content? Have you reached out to influencers who may want to share it with their followers?

There’s a big bunch of stuff you can do! A great article to look at is one by one of our members, Sara Bussandri, who helps business owners repurpose blog content into Linkedin posts and articles.

10. Don’t forget about your website in favour of social media

It’s safe to say that if you neglect your website in favour of social media, it’s unlikely to get much traffic. You can’t have ‘build it and they will come’ mentality to your website. You have to actively focus on getting more traffic and higher search engine rankings.

How to get more traffic to your website?

That sounds like a lot of work. But actually, if you dedicate some time to it, it can pay dividends for a long time. We generate traffic, leads and sales from articles we published years ago! And all we had to do was write it once and optimise it well. One of our MYMO members Janine, now gets more enquiries through her website, when she previously relied on LinkedIn to generate sales.

Where On Earth Do You Start?

Okay, so this may seem a little overwhelming. And we get that.

First things first, if you’re not producing blog content, do it. Commit to it. Because this will make THE biggest difference to your website traffic and rankings.

If you’re already blogging, are your posts gaining much traffic? Are you producing the right type of blog post? Are you getting in front of people who are searching?

Our Content Marketing Planner will help you with this. It’ll help you plan an entire year’s worth of content in 30 minutes or less! And it’s the right kind of content that will deliver website traffic.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post How to Increase Your Website Traffic in Just 10 Simple Steps appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Yeah. We are. 

Why? 

We all have questions when we buy something, don’t we? Especially something new. Something you can’t see. Like our Content Planning Toolkit. 

So in true “content marketing” style, we wrote this article to answer all your questions. 

But I get that this is our product, and I’m naturally biased. So I’ve tried to make this as unbiased as possible so you can make an informed buying decision. 

After all, you don’t want you to buy something that isn’t right for you. And we don’t want that either. We want super happy customers.

So have a look at our blog post below to see if the Content Planning Toolkit is right for you. 

What is the Content planning toolkit?

The toolkit is a combination of tools and training videos that help you plan and schedule your content for an entire year.

What’s included in the Toolkit?

We’ve included a number of content planning tools such as:

• A 5-part mini course showing you what kind of content you can create to generate more leads and sales
• An (expanded) Content Matrix that will give you over 500 content ideas that you can use for blog posts, videos and podcast episodes
• A Content Planning Cheat Sheet that you can use before you produce every piece of content to get the best results
• A Blog Post Checklist to ensure you get the best results from your effort
• A YouTube Checklist so you don’t miss an important factor that could impact your rankings
• A Podcast Checklist to save yourself wasting time when recording 
• A Progress Tracker so you can track how your stats improve over time
• A content Schedule Trello Board so you can plan when your content will be published in the weeks and months ahead
• Instruction Videos for each tool so you know how to use it.

How much does the Toolkit cost?

The entire toolkit costs $47 (+VAT if applicable). 

This is a one-time fee so there are no ongoing fees and you get access to this product for LIFE.

Why does the toolkit cost $47?

I’m always suspicious of stuff that is too cheap. I generally feel that it may not deliver what it promises. Sometimes, it’s true, you do get what you pay for. 

But truthfully, we didn’t want price to be an objection when it came to the Content Planning Toolkit. 

We think content marketing can be really beneficial for your business if you do it right. And we’d like to help more people get started (rather than just a few), hence the reason this is VERY cheap.

Is there a refund policy?

With the downloadable nature of the content inside, we do not offer any refunds. However, based on the feedback we’ve already received,  we’re pretty confident you wouldn’t want a refund 😉

Who is it for?

The content planning toolkit is not for everyone and we only want you to buy it if it’s right for you.

This is for IF:

• You struggle to come up with content ideas
• You don’t have much time, and you need a few tools to make producing content easier and faster
• You want to create content that helps educate your customers before they get in touch with you 
• You want better rankings from your content 

This is NOT for you if:

• You don’t want to put in any work 
• You don’t think content marketing is worth the effort
• You’re not open to new ideas
• You’d rather spend lots of time on the phone/email speaking with potential customers 

Will this work for my Niche?

The tools and information in the toolkit will work for any industry. I honestly can’t think of a niche that wouldn’t benefit from this product.

Here are some of the business types that have seen results using this method…

• Freelancers
• Service providers
• Coaches and consultants
• Bloggers
• Vloggers
• Podcasters
• Big businesses

How long will it take to go through the toolkit?

The mini-course is made up of 5 videos each lasting around 10-15 mins each.

Each of the tools has a video to explain how to use it at around 5 mins each

To fill in the content planning matrix and give yourself a content marketing strategy takes around 20-30 minutes. 

In total, I would estimate that this would take you around 1.5 hours, but you don’t have to do it all at once to get hundreds of content ideas.

Who are the trainers?

Lyndsay and I (Martin) will be guiding you through the various tools and training inside the content planning toolkit.

Lyndsay will be guiding you through the mini-course, and I will be showing you how to use the various tools.

How do you access the content planning toolkit?

Once you have purchased the toolkit, you’ll get an email to welcome you and an email to set your PASSWORD, you’ll then be able to log in at https://contentplanningtoolkit.com/ 

All of the content is available straight away, and you can access everything from the dashboard.

Why have we created it?

People think content marketing is hard work, and it can be. BUT it’s extremely rewarding if you do it right. We’ve been there ourselves, and we’ve seen the results.

The reason we created this was to make your life easier when it comes to planning and producing content. 

What results can I expect?

Your results will obviously depend on how much work you put in, but I can tell you that since we started creating content we have…

• Increased our traffic by 10x in the first 12 months
• Raised our prices by 500% due to demand
• 90% of the proposals we send go to sale
• Spend 50% less time communicating with clients because our content does the talking for us.

How should I sign up?

If you’re interested in joining us, you can sign up here or by clicking the link below, and get instant access for a single payment of $47.00 +VAT if applicable. 

I’m still not sure…

If you have any further questions, just email us as hello@jammydigital.com 

What’s next? 

If you decide to buy the toolkit and back into or start content marketing, then we’re so EXCITED for you! We’d love to know how you get on! Drop us an email at hello@jammydigital.com

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Everything You Need to Know About Our Content Planning Toolkit appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

In this post, we talk about why SEO is important for personal brand website owners like you and give you some tips on how to increase your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.

But first, why does SEO even matter?

Why does SEO matter?

As consumers, whenever we’re looking to buy something (a product or a service), we tend to do our own research. And when we’re ready to make a purchase, credit card in hand, we head over to Google (or Bing or Yahoo) and check out the links for the top results.

So why does this matter to you as a business owner?

When your website appears at the top of the Google search results, you have an opportunity to drive more organic traffic to your website – i.e. traffic that’s not driven through paid-for advertising.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is what allows you to increase your online visibility, and, in turn, your sales. But in order for this to work, you need your website to come up in the search results on the first page of Google when someone types in a query that is related to your topic of expertise.

So what can you do to improve your chances of claiming those spots at the top of the search results?

User experience and SEO – is there a difference?

SEO can often become a technical and complicated topic. But it doesn’t have to be. [bctt tweet=”When you focus on delivering a great user experience to your audience, you’re ticking most of the SEO boxes because great user experience is exactly what Google aims to deliver.” username=”@Jammy_Digital”]

So if you want to get into ‘Google’s good books’, adopt a user experience mindset. In other words, focus on what a great website looks like in the eyes of your users, and you’re already setting yourself up for success when it comes to ranking.

How do smaller, service-based business compete with big corporates to rank higher on Google?

If you’re a small business and worry about how you can compete with bigger companies with larger budgets and more ‘SEO power’, here’s the good news.

By focusing on a specific niche within your industry and concentrating your efforts on creating a website that’s interesting, engaging, and valuable, you’re more likely to rank on the first page of Google for the specific search terms (or keywords) that relate to your business. 

If you create the right type of laser-focused content that is relevant to your users and your business, you have more chances of coming up at the top of the search results than some of the bigger companies that cover much wider areas and topics.

Let’s use an example to explain this. If you type a question into Google, you’ll want to find the best possible answer. Google wants to provide you, the user, with the answer that most matches your search criteria. So if a larger company doesn’t have the right type of content to answer that specific question but you do, your content may be picked over the bigger company’s.

Of course, other factors such as how old your website is or how much traffic you get also play a part. But ultimately, the best solution that Google finds is what gets presented first in the search results. This is why it’s much easier to think about SEO from a content perspective – always aim to answer your prospective clients’ questions in the best possible way. 

There are things you can do to optimise your website and increase your chances of ranking on the first page of Google.

1. Treat your service pages like your homepage

A lot of business owners we meet make the mistake of putting a lot of effort into their home page, but then neglecting their service pages. But when you think about it, by doing that, you’re missing opportunities. Every single page of your website (and, specifically, your service pages) can be optimised for search. And so can your blog posts! If you want to know more about this, read our article How to Optimise Your Blog Posts.

So if you offer a range of different services, create one page for each of your services and optimise each page individually.

To rank well on search engines, you’ll need to think about the content on these pages. What would your user be searching for? Try to give as much information as possible about your service (while still keeping your writing succinct and clear). Examples of things you could include on your service page are:

• An overview of your service
• Who the service is suitable for
• The main benefits of your service
• How much it costs for your service
• Case studies and testimonials related to your service
• The process/how you carry out the service
• Frequently asked questions about your service
• Related content such as blog posts, podcast episodes, guides etc.

2. Don’t forget about longtail keywords on your service pages

When you create individual pages for each of your services, you get to include the relevant keywords in each of them. This isn’t just great in the eyes of Google, but it’s fantastic for your users too, as they get to only consume content that’s relevant to what they’re after. 

As an example, let’s say you offer both editing and proofreading services. Having a page completely dedicated to your proofreading services allows you to include (and potentially rank for) different search terms or keywords, like ‘proofreading London’ or ‘proofreading service rates’, etc.

Including other, related and more specific keywords is a smart move because if you tried to rank for the search term ‘proofreader’, you’d struggle to get to the first page of Google. The term is too broad and generic, and too many other websites are ‘competing’ with each other to rank for that keyword. Plus, the search isn’t specific enough! What is the user trying to do? Find out what a proofreader is for a school project? Or trying to find a proofreader to hire?

So here’s where our advice of ‘niching down’ comes into its own. You might struggle to rank for ‘proofreader’, but you’ll have better chances of ranking for long-tail keywords (i.e. longer phrases or sets of words), like:

• How much does a proofreader cost?
• What does proofreading include?
• How does the proofreading process work?
• How long does it take for you to proofread my work?

Think of specific and targeted keywords that your ideal clients are likely to search for and build your web pages around those terms. 

3. Get Good at Content Marketing

Can you use your blog content to help you rank higher?

Absolutely!

Take us, for example. Over time, we’ve created blog posts that answer questions that our prospective clients ask us all the time. We’ve written blog posts, like:

• How Long Does It Take To Build A Website?
• Why You Need a Maintenance Plan for your Website
• Why New Businesses Shouldn’t Spend 1000s on a Website

By going deep into your content efforts and by creating regular blog content that is optimised for several keywords, you can increase the number of visitors that land on your website

How Do I Come up with Content Marketing ideas?

So how can you come up with ideas for content? Once again, think about your users (and user experience first).

Make a note of the questions that your prospective clients ask you on a regular basis and answer them through your content. If one person asks you, chances are that other people will want to know as well, so answer your questions ‘at scale’.

And if you’re just starting out and aren’t sure about what questions your audience might have, use Google! Have you ever noticed the section at the bottom called ‘Searches related to’?

Or you can use other free online resources to work out what keywords people are mostly looking for. A great tool (with a free trial) that we always recommend is KWFinder. You enter your chosen keywords and see how many people search for it each month.

Our top tip here is to create content for long-tail keywords that sound just like the questions your prospective clients may ask you. Things like:

• How much does a proofreader charge?
• What is included in a proofreading package?

Because these search terms are much longer and more niche, they’re likely to have less competition. In other words, less content has been written to answer those specific questions, which means that if you go after those keywords, you have a better chance of ranking.

Create in-depth content that answers your customers’ questions

Our most-successful blog posts go into a lot of details. And that’s not surprising, as, in the eyes of Google, longer pieces of content provide an in-depth answer to your search query. If you think about a topic from a user perspective and make a list of all the related and relevant questions someone might have on that topic, you’ll easily come up with a longer piece of content.

Also, in-depth content gives you opportunities to include more than just one keyword. And when the additional keywords are also terms that people search for, you have better chances of ranking!

Our most successful piece of content, (that gets more traffic than our homepage) is ‘Why Am I Not Ranking in Google, and How to Fix It’ 

This was as a result of constantly being asked this question. The blog post is over 3000 words, but it breaks the question down simply. 11 reasons why you’re not ranking in Google, with an explanation, then an explanation of how to fix it.

So think about the main question you want to answer with your blog post and then break it down, like the chapters of a book. You’ll then turn those related topics into sub-heading (just like we’ve done in this blog post) and include any related keywords in the sub-headings.

If you’re using WordPress or any other Content Management System, you can assign heading tags to these individual subheadings. These can be set as Headings 2, Headings 3, Headings 4, etc. And by doing this, you’re telling not only organising your content nicely for your users, but you’re telling the search engines how your content is structured, which can help you increase your ‘SEO power’. It’s a win-win!

If you want more details around how to optimise your blog content and your website pages for SEO, head over to our blog post: The Ultimate SEO Checklist for your Blog Posts.

Finally, Should I hire an SEO company?

And last but not least, here’s a question our clients ask us all the time. Should you hire an SEO company?

The answer is that it depends. If you have the budget and your business can afford it, you can. But it’s important that you first have a solid understanding of the SEO basics and are clear on what you’re paying for and what you want to achieve.

If you find yourself in a crowded market with a lot of competition and are struggling to stand out, hiring a good SEO company that helps you build high-quality backlinks to your website (through reaching out to influencers, guest posting, etc.) could work out for you in the long run.

But any good SEO company should either recommend content marketing or do it for you. By creating the right type of content (either as a page on your site or blog post) and optimising it, you will see an increase in website traffic. 

Would you like some help with your content marketing and SEO strategy? 

If you’re looking for some support with your content marketing or SEO strategy, why not join our membership, Make Your Mark Online?

In January, we’re starting our 90 Day Challenge, where you write one piece of content a week for 90 days and we’ll review it, telling you what you need to do to improve it for SEO.

What is the Membership About?

If you’re after an ‘agency-level’ website (but without the agency price tag) and want a WordPress website that ranks, gets you more traffic, and delivers you more sales, that’s exactly what we help our members do.

We offer video courses, weekly live Q&A calls, a private Slack group, and member-only resources which include a handy SEO planner. Come and check it out, and if you have any questions, just give us a shout!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post How to make your service-based business website rank higher on Google appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

How do you feel about your website? Do you find yourself sharing the link and then caveating that with: “Oh, don’t look at the home page – I need to update it”? Or, “I know I need to improve it, but I haven’t had the chance yet”? I did. In fact, forget that. For the first few months after creating my website, I didn’t even tell anyone it even existed! I didn’t have a countdown or do a big launch. I did nothing. In fact, I secretly hoped no one stumbled upon it (by accident) and realised I didn’t know what I was doing! But then I joined the Make Your Mark Online membership, and things have been quite different since.

Here’s how I felt about my website before joining the membership

Before I found Martin and Lyndsay and their free Facebook community, I had literally spent months online, looking for a suitable WordPress theme and researching hosting solutions. Once I got that all sorted, I spent weeks making changes to the template – thinking on my feet about what went where and how I’d word it all. I really struggled to define my offers, design my website, and write my own copy all at the same time.

The result? I ended up feeling overwhelmed and stupid. I was clearly stumbling in the dark here – blatantly making it up as I went along. And I honestly had no idea whether any of what I’d done was any good. So I continued to keep my website well under wraps.

Until one day LinkedIn decided to inform me that Martin, who I’d come across in another membership, had officially joined forces with the other half of the Jammy Digital team, his wife Lyndsay. And they were offering free website critiques. (I mean, how cool is that?!). Terrified, I decided it was either this or nothing. This was my chance. I knew I wouldn’t get it back, so I jumped at the opportunity and put my half-baked website up for review. (Through gritted teeth and with one eye closed, obvs).

My free website critique

My website critique went much better than I had expected, but the mindblowing thing for me was that within 10 minutes, both Martin and Lyndsay had given me some great, actionable advice. About things I wouldn’t have known I needed to change. Things I didn’t even know were things. Did you know it’s best to have all your menu items in one line? Did you know you’ve got to really think carefully about what goes ‘above the fold’? Actually, wait, did you know what ‘above the fold’ even means?! ‘Cos I certainly didn’t!

Why I joined the Make Your Mark Online (MYMO) membership

In the months that followed, Martin and Lyndsay continued turning up, week in and week out, offering people free website critiques. And I started to notice a theme – they were really quick to pinpoint where a website needed improvement. They knew their stuff. And they weren’t just talking about design or copy – they were giving out tips on branding, positioning, user experience, photography. You name it. And the penny dropped – I realised my website could do a lot more for me.

Around the same time, Martin and Lyndsay also started their podcast, and that’s when I totally fell in love with these guys. I had had the pleasure of attending some of Martin’s training on WordPress and SEO in the past, and I knew he has this beautiful way of explaining complicated and technical things really easily, in a way that’s engaging and makes you want to listen and learn. And Lyndsay comes with a huge amount of knowledge and expertise around copywriting and marketing, not to mention a contagious dose of genuine positivity and fun. Put these two together, and I’d just listen to them all day! (When’s the Martin&Lyndsay Show starting, Guys?)

So when the doors to the membership opened, I knew I wanted to join. It was really that easy.

But… just like any other small business owner out there, I need to be careful with my expenses. So I still had some questions:

• Could I really afford another membership?
• Would I make use of it?
• Would I get a return on my investment?

And do you know what convinced me? This blog post: Concerns you might have about joining our membership. It didn’t just totally hit the mark with me. It also proved (once again) that Martin and Lyndsay know what they’re doing.

My mind was made.

Joining really was a no-brainer.

Video Review of the Make Your Mark Online Membership

Some of the wins I experienced since joining the membership

And I know made the right choice! The membership has really exceeded my expectations, not just in terms of quality and content. Martin and Lyndsay genuinely care about you and the success of your business. They always go the extra mile to help and add value.
So here’s what I’ve done since joining the MYMO membership.

• I got clearer on the products and services I sell and re-structured, re-designed, and re-wrote most of my web pages.
• I created a pricing table as a direct result of Martin and Lyndsay’s advice, which allowed me to remove a huge amount of text from my website and improve the user experience.
• My website isn’t a source of shame anymore – I’m proud of it! I’ve received tons of great feedback on how professional it looks! And I’ve had clients telling me that my website was what convinced them to start working with me! (Whoop!)
• I recorded and shared a video a day inside the community – something I’d been carefully avoiding for years!
• I met a great mix of supportive professionals (mainly personal brand entrepreneurs) in different industries and at different stages of their business. (Super useful!)
• And last but not least, I started to drive traffic to my website and convert some of this traffic into email subscribers, which is a great personal achievement! (If you’re a small business owner, you’ll know how good this feels!)

The best thing? I’ve had fun in the process!

Your website is never finished

As Martin and Lyndsay always say, “your website is never finished.” (Can you believe theirs isn’t either?). For me, this is just the beginning. I’m excited at the thought of how much better my website will look a year from now. And I’m confident that as my business develops and grows, with Martin and Lyndsay and all the MYMO members on my side, my website will too. I’m definitely a proud member of this community (and don’t tell these guys), but I won’t be going anywhere for a very long time!

Now, before Martin and Lyndsay think I’ve turned into a right ol’ stalker, let me leave you with just one thought.

Why you SHOULD join the MYMO community

If you have a website you’re not happy with, if the thought of making tweaks to it makes you want to run the other way, or if you ever feel like you don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to your website but you’re not ready to hire a web designer yet, you’re going to get a huge amount of help and support inside this membership.

Being a personal brand entrepreneur can be hard at times – there’s only one of you, and you can’t possibly be an expert at everything! Joining the MYMO membership allows you to directly tap into Martin and Lyndsay’s knowledge and expertise – and all the other members’ too!

Plus, it’s a fun place to be, and I honestly think that Martin and Lyndsay are some of the most genuine and caring people you’ll find online. They’re real, relatable people who care about the success of their clients.

What’s not to love, right?

So, will you be joining us?

FIND OUT MORE

About Sara

Sara Bussandri

The post Should you join the Make Your Mark Online membership? Honest Review appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Trying to appeal to more than one target audience on your website is tricky.

It’s difficult to make sure our message connects with each audience we’re targeting. For example, a recruitment agency must appeal to businesses to work with, but they must also attract good candidates too. How would they go about appealing to both audiences on the one website?

There are methods of achieving this and it’s something we carefully consider when we build websites.

In this episode, we walk-through the ways you can do this successfully.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • Examples of business who appeal to more than one audience
  • Should you set up a new website for your separate audiences?
  • When you should set up your own website and when you shouldn’t
  • How to signpost your particular audience to the right place on your website
  • Using CTAs and your big, bold statement to appeal to more than one audience
  • Do you need different layouts and page designs for different audiences?

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

1.18 – Who would need to consider more than one audience on their website?
2.39 – Is it worth setting up a new website for each target audience?
5.52 – How to signpost people to the right page on your website
6.45 – Using your CTAs to direct your end users
7.52 – How to write a big, bold statement for multiple audiences
9.50 – Getting your promo area to direct people to the right place
10.39 – Having unique pages per service
11.00 – What to write on the services pages to appeal to your audiences
13.42 – Thinking about your users’ journey
14.12 – Do you need different page designs for different audiences?

Useful Resources and Links

Membership Community 

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Episode Transcript Below

Welcome to the Make Your Mark Online Podcast, where we help personal brands building grow a successful business website.

Please welcome your hosts, husband and wife team, Martin and Lyndsay.

Welcome to Episode 14 of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. Today, we’re gonna be talking about how you can use your website to appeal to numerous audiences.

But before we get into that, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Membership. This is our signature membership community, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. This actually launched on Monday, the 1st of October, and we’ll be closing the doors on the 14th of October, 10:00 p.m. in UK time. So, if you wanna get in at the lowest possible price ever, then visit makeyourmarkonline.net We won’t be opening the doors until January, and then we’re gonna be charging $39 a month. So, save yourself $10 a month if you sign up before the 14th.

So, let’s get into the show!

So, today we’re talking about our websites, and what we can do with them if we have a number of different audiences, different target audiences. So, Lyndsay.

Yes.

Why would somebody want to do this, or need to do it?

Well, actually, it’s more common than you think. And we’ve come across it so many times with our clients, and people that we talk to on a regular basis. A lot of business owners have to think about completely different audiences for their products.

So, recently, we had one lady ask about this in our Facebook group. She’s a fitness trainer and dance teacher who came up with a kind of like a new exercise routine. And her website needed to appeal to two audiences.

So, the first one was actually just getting customers through the doors to her fitness studio. But the second one was other fitness trainers looking for a new routine that she could franchise to.

Got it.

So, they had completely different goals. There was the customers who were looking to get fitter and healthier in like a fun way, and then there was the fitness trainers, who were looking for a new routine they could use to get more customers.

So, that’s completely different. And their needs were completely different. And there’s loads of examples of this. Kind of like if you think about recruitment agencies. You know, they’ve gotta appeal to the candidates, where they get people’s CVs and information. But they’ve also gotta appeal to businesses. You know the people that actually pay them and, you know, the people that they want to work with, and provide candidates for.

So, there’s a lot of examples of this. And this is something that comes up time and time again, and a question we get asked quite a lot.

Yeah. So, we see this when we’re building websites as well. Lots of our clients have different segments of their audience that they need to appeal to. And one of the questions that we get asked quite a lot is whether or not it’s worth setting up an additional website for the audience.

Is that the right thing to do?

It’s an interesting one. It’s always really tricky when people ask should they open another website. I’ve know business owners with five or six websites. And the difficulty is, is that websites take a lot of work. Or should I say, they should take a lot of work because, you know, you need to be updating your website constantly. You need to be adding content. You need to be driving traffic to that content. And that takes an awful lot of work. I mean, we know just having one website, that it takes a lot of work. Having more than one is difficult. It is tricky. So, you have to think very carefully about whether it’s worth setting up a brand new website for your separate service with a separate audience.

Yeah, exactly. And we’ve actually just been through this with our new membership. So, our agency, obviously, as you guys know is Jammy Digital. This is where we build websites, and we help people redesign or start a brand new business, and they need a website.

So, when we launched the membership, we had to think long and hard whether or not we wanted to include the membership on the main website, or whether or not we’d set it up elsewhere. And again, it’s not an easy decision, but in the end we decided, you know, it needs its own home. It needs its own membership site. It needs its own face, and its own branding.

So, although it’s very closely linked, it is separate.

Yeah, definitely. And that’s a really good point, actually, Martin. It needed its own brand. So, I think that’s always a clear indicator as to whether you need another website. Because if something needs its own brand, it needs its own close, it needs its own logo, it needs lots of pages of content, you know, that kind of thing, then that’s a good indicator that yes, it probably will work on another website.

If it just needs a page, and it can kind of fit into your brand already, then you might just wanna look at having it housed on your website itself. Because like we said, there’s a lot of work. You have two websites, that’s automatically double the work there.

Yeah. And that’s twice as much marketing, that’s twice as much Facebook posts, that’s twice as much LinkedIn-

Exactly.

… that’s another Twitter account, potentially.

Yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, we’ve very much kept it close to home. You know, we are using the same social media platforms. It’s just that we have Make Your Mark Online as a product, which is why it kind of works, because we can still kind of group it in, and talk about it on our main social media platforms.

We got away with it, didn’t we?

Yeah, exactly. But that’s what you can do if you create additional product within your business. But if you’re creating a separate business website altogether, then that’s where it might not be necessary. That’s what you’re saying.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Okay. So, let’s say we want to use our existing website. We know we can do that. We just want to appeal to more than one audience. How can we actually go about it? What kind of tangible stuff can our listeners take away and action today?

Yeah, it’s a good question, actually, because a lot of people get this wrong, but it’s so, so simple to actually do. And it all starts with a homepage. I mean, we talk a lot about the homepage. We could talk for hours and hours about it. But we need to use this page to signpost people to the right places on your website.

If you think of yourself and your website like you’re kind of directing road traffic. So, imagine you’re just … stood in the middle of the road with your little whistle, and-

Yeah, don’t do that. It’s dangerous.

No, don’t do that, please. But imagine you are and, you know, you’re directing cars left and right, and straight on. That’s exactly what you need to do with your website. You need to sort of stand there and say, “Okay, you need to go over there. You need to go over there. And you need to go this way.” And people always get that wrong on their homepage, but that’s the biggest thing that you can do. If you’re appealing to more than one audience, then you need to quickly get them to the areas that they need to be on their website.

So, for example, we’ll often have two call-to-action buttons in the big, bold statement area. And, basically, the first third of the homepage, where you see it kind of straightaway. So, if I’m using a recruitment agency as an example, then you might have two buttons. One might say, “Looking for an exciting, new career.” The other might say, “Looking for the perfect candidate.” And automatically then, the audience knows, “Okay, I need to click on that button to get to the right place.”

It’s very, very, very simple, but a lot of people forget to do it.

Yeah. It does sound simple, but that’s because it is. I mean, we’re not talking rocket science here. We’re just talking about giving people the information that they need, and making it easy for them. And a minute ago, we were talking about redesigning an entire new website for a new business. But actually, just by labeling these buttons, and giving people that clear direction, that’s generally enough. That’s what you’re saying.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Perfect. It’s interesting, actually, that you mention the big, bold statement, because we talk about this a lot. But actually coming up with a big, bold statement is a little more tricky when you have two audiences, isn’t it?

Yeah, definitely. It is. So, just so our audience knows, a big, bold statement is essentially the sort of summary of your business, and what it is that you do. So as soon as someone lands on your website, they should be immediately hit by a sentence that kind of summarizes what it is that you do, so your audience knows they’re in the right place.

And, yes, if you are appealing to more than one audience, then this can be a little bit more tricky, ’cause you kind of have to be a little bit more vague with your big, bold statement, I think.

Yeah. So, it might take you a little bit longer than it normally would if you have a number of different audiences. But it is actually quite interesting because we did an episode just on the big, bold statement, and we’ll link to that in the show notes. And we came up with nine different ways to create a big, bold statement. And some of these, you can’t actually use if you have a number of audiences.

So, for example, if you do blog-writing services for start-ups. If that’s your products and service that you offer, and you have an additional audience, maybe you are trying to appeal to agencies, maybe you offer white label, then you can’t just say, “Blog-writing services for start-ups.” It’s important that you actually think about both of your audience.

And so, for instance, you might come up with something like, “Creating better content for the world,” or whatever. That’s a really bad example, but-

Yeah, but it’s about making it a little bit more … having that bit more broader appeal, isn’t it?

Yeah. So that you can reach the two audiences, I suppose. The more specific you go, the more direct you can go, which is great. But if you do have two audiences, then that’s when you have to kind of step back a little bit, and think about your communication, in general, what it is that you do.

Yeah. But then, if you have two buttons underneath that, so you have, you know, “Writing for start-ups,” or “White label service,” then it kind of clarifies then what it is that you do, and then gets people to the right place. So, you can start with a more broader, I think, big, bold statement. That’s absolutely fine.

And the promo area too. The promo area is essentially the area where you kind of house your services. So, normally, this is under the big, bold statement, and you have your sort of three or four key main services, and people can click on them and go to the right sort of page. So, that’s where you will, again, start to direct people where they need to go.

You don’t just do it once on your homepage. You kind of need to keep reminding people, “Okay, you’re here, and you need to go over here,” you know. It needs to be a constant reminder on your homepage. Get your audience to the right part of your website. We always say this: “Your homepage is just to get people to the next page of your website. That’s all you need to do.”

So, constantly remind them on your homepage to get to the next page of your website.

So, you mentioned all the pages, actually getting your visitor to another page on your website.

Yeah.

Are you saying that we should have a unique services page for each service?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think this is another thing that people get wrong. Because people just have, sometimes, just one page that kind of appeals to both audiences, which is-

Yeah, we see that a lot, don’t we? And especially on website critiques-

Yeah!

They kind of group their services and their audiences together, and-

Yes. Yeah. We’re constantly telling them, “Keep it separate.” Because there’s no point. You know, if you’re a recruitment agency, and you’ve got a candidate who’s looking for information about what jobs you’ve got, there’s no point in them learning about what you can do for companies. There’s absolutely no point in them even looking at that content. So, why are they on that page? You need completely separate pages. And you need to think about, on these separate pages, the kind of needs and problems that the people are having, that your audiences are having, and write that content specifically for them.

So, for example, on the page for people looking for a new career on a recruitment agency website, you need to say, “Okay, so you might be feeling underappreciated at work. You might be looking for something new. This is how we can help you.” Everything should be geared towards that person, and there should be no content that isn’t specifically for them on that page.

Yeah. This is where we come back to each of your web pages is kind of its own tool. It’s kind of its own salesperson, really, to get people to fill out the contact form or, in your example, submit your CV. Like you are the recruitment agency that I go in to find me a job that I am appreciated in. You’re talking about using your copy to convert these people to become leads.

Yeah. It’s not just your content as well, it’s actually everything on the page that you need to think about. So, if you were having testimonials on that page, don’t just have any random testimonials on there. So, if we take recruitment agency for an example, and you’ve got a candidate thinking, “Should I work with this recruitment agency? Will they find me a good career?” There’s no point in having a testimonial on there for some, you know, CEO of a big business. You’ve gotta have a testimonial on there from someone who was a candidate, who has found your service really helpful. And you’ve gotta think about all these things. If you’ve got links to your blog content on there, make sure it’s relevant for the actual person that’s on the page. So, you have to think about all these things, and really appreciate that every page on your website should be geared towards that particular audience segment. And this is even more important if you’re appealing to lots and lots of different audiences.

Yeah, ’cause each of these audiences has their concerns, their problems, that they faced in the past. And they have a … yeah, essentially, a problem that they need you to solve. And if you just start speaking to them in general terms about the fact that, “You know, we do recruitment, and we are great people.”

“We’ve done recruitment for 25 years,” and all that kind of stuff. No. Make it really specific. Exactly. Don’t make it general. The most of it can go on your individual pages on your website, the better. Definitely.

Yeah. It’s about thinking about your visitor and their journey. What journey are they going to go on? When I say journey, I don’t mean philosophical. I mean, actually, what pages are they gonna click on, what images are they gonna click on, what length, where they’re gonna go. And map out all of the different sort of points of that journey, until they get in touch, and then how you use their recruitment agency.

Exactly. Exactly, yes. Yeah.

So, this seems like quite a lot of work. That’s the only problem. That’s the only thing-

That is the only problem.

… our listeners might be concerned with. So, if they’re creating lots of page designs, and lots of different things for each audience, do they have to create a completely unique design? Are they gonna have to kind of contact the web designer, or create a new page completely?

No. Definitely not. And, you know, if you’ve got sort of different audiences, there’s no reason why you should have a completely different design. I mean, in an ideal world, it might be nice, it might work, but your time is precious. So, you can keep the same design. You have some content, you have some images, you have testimonial, you have links to your blog post. That’s absolutely fine, you know, to keep that on every page. Just make sure the content is different. Make sure the content and the call-to-actions speak to your individual audiences.

Yeah. So, think about your images, and what your audience are gonna connect to. It’s gonna be different things. It absolutely is.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You just have to switch them out really. You have to switch out the content. You have to switch out the images. You probably have to switch out testimonials, and the blog content. But you don’t have to kind of make each page a different design.

No, it can follow the same layout, and structure.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which is gonna save you a little bit of time. And know that it’s time-consuming this way, and know that it’s easier to talk in general terms, and have one page that tries to suit everyone. But it’s just not gonna convey as well. So, it’s worth putting the time and effort into actually thinking about your different audiences, exactly what they need, exactly what problems they’re facing, and writing specific pages for them.

Okay. Well, that all sounds quite achievable. I think it’s … We’ve given a few tips away there for somebody who does want to introduce additional audience, or is concerned that they might need to pay out for a new website. Clearly, you don’t. I mean, in most scenarios, we would very rarely recommend that someone has an additional website. It’s quite easy when you think about things the way that we’ve explained, to actually imagine how it might look if you do have completely different audiences. And, yeah, I think our listeners will find that valuable.

Yeah, definitely. I think it can seem very complicated, and kind of scary, but it’s not really. And if you think about like you said, your customer’s journey, that person’s journey, you know, starting at the home page, okay, how are they going to then try and get in touch with you? How are you gonna get them to do that? And what pages will they click on? What process will they take?

If you think about it from that point of view, you can easily kind of plot it out, generally, and get them to the right place.

So, hopefully, you found that episode useful. Let us know if you have any questions at all. Join the Facebook group as well. If you go to jammydigital.com/facebook And ask us any follow-up questions about it. We don’t ask this enough actually. Get involved in the community. Share a link to your website, and let us critique it. At the minute, we are doing free website critiques in our Facebook group every Wednesday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. And we’ll happily take a look at it, and point you in the right direction, and tell you how to improve it.

Don’t forget, there are only a few days left until we close the doors for three months for the Make Your Mark Online Membership. This is our signature membership program, where we teach personal brands how to build and grow a successful business website. We teach you all about WordPress. We teach you all about SEO. We teach you how to define your personal brand, and really build a website that you could be proud of as well.

So, check that out at makeyourmarkonline.net

And we’ll see you in the next episode!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Ep 14 – How to appeal to more than one audience on your website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

We were bright-eyed twenty-one-year-olds when we invested every penny we had (and hadn’t, to be honest) into a brand new website.

It failed miserably.

In this episode, we uncover what went so wrong in our first ever business, so you don’t make the same mistakes as us.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• Why you need to do your research into web design agencies
• Why investing loads of money didn’t work
• How having no backup funds is dangerous
• Finding a web designer that’s right for you
• Researching the right framework for your website

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

5.00- Why did it fail?
5.10 – Our lack of research into web design agencies
6.20 – A ‘build it and they will come’ mentality
8.00 – Don’t expose yourself financially
9.30 – Understanding that you need time
11.00 – Getting no traffic to your website
14.00 – Investing in a website in an extremely competitive niche
15.20 – Going too fast
16.00 – The website is the beginning of your business
19.15 – Getting obsessed with the website
20.25 – Try taking your heart out of it
21.30 – Don’t invest when you don’t have the money

Useful Resources and Links

Jammy Digital SEO webinar 

DIY Website vs Agency

Website Buyer’s Guide 

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Episode Transcript Below

Welcome to episode nine of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about why our first website failed so badly, and it’s gonna be a really interesting episode, but before we get into the show, we wanted you to know that we are running a free online webinar all about SEO for personal brands. Now this is taking place on Thursday, the sixth of September at 8:00 P.M. BST or 3:00 P.M. EST. Now if you’re listening to this podcast when it’s just being released, you still have a couple of days to sign up to the webinar. If you just go to JammyDigital.com/webinar, then you’ll be able to pop your name and email address on the page there, and we’ll send you our unique for the webinar. Okay, let’s get on with the show.

So Martin, this is a really funny episode actually ’cause it’s kind of going back in time, but we weren’t always web designers, were we?

No. Yeah, surprisingly I didn’t just happen to know HTML as a toddler. Yeah, it’s definitely something that we’ve picked up later on in life.

Yeah, definitely. We’re talking about our first website, so this was when we were probably 21, 22. We were real babies.

Yeah, eight, nine years ago, something like that.

Yeah, something like that. Makes us feel very old. But like I said, we weren’t always web designers, but we did start up a completely new business, didn’t we?

Yeah, it was completely random really. We bought kind of these cushions and some home furnishings and just some odd bits that we wanted to sell online really. So we’re selling stuff on Ebay, and we were doing odd market stalls, and we actually really enjoyed it. It kinda got us out and about, and we’re obviously glutton for punishments, because we just gave up our entire free time to run this business while we were both working full time. So it wasn’t easy, but we enjoy it, yeah.

Yeah, definitely. And like you said, yeah, it was pretty much our weekends we spent. We actually went to sort of farmers markets and things like that. We sold our soft furnishings on there, and yeah, like you said, it was our evenings and weekends, even though we’re working full time that we actually invested into this sort of extra business. So we did try and make the decision to take it one step further and invest into a website.

Yeah, exactly. And we’ve always enjoyed design. Lyndsay, you’ve got your marketing background, and I’ve always known a little bit about HTML and CSS, so I had the skills potentially to be able to build a website, but we wanted it done properly at that point, wanted to make sure it was an online shop, people could buy from anywhere in the world. And we just wanted to hire a professional really, so we actually paid a web designer to build this singing, all dancing website. And it was a real struggle financially for us to do it, but we managed to get the money together, didn’t we?

Investing in a New Website

Yeah, we did. And I remember now, I think it was 1400 pound, which I mean money is relative, isn’t it? So at the time, that was all the money that we had in the world. We had to save up quite a while for that, and yeah, it was a really, really big investment for us because we weren’t massively well paid from our jobs at the time. We were just starting out in our careers, and so, yeah, this was a big, huge investment, and we put everything into it. So I think this episode really is about how we can help all the people not make the gigantic mistakes that we did when we first got a website.

Yeah, we just want to kind of give you our experience, so that you can, yeah, avoid the same mistakes. It’s as simple as that really because there are a few simple mistakes that listening to us, you’ll probably be like, “Well, that’s stupid. Why did you do that?”

“What are you doing?”

Exactly.

Remember we were 22.

And we were just excited, and we were trying to be proactive, and we were trying to be positive. And the business model in general that we had was actually quite risky in the fact that you buy products with your money, and then you have to try and sell and recoup the costs. So it’s not like a freelance business, is it? Where you can just make money just by doing your service. There’s a lot of risk there, and we actually put quite a lot on our credit cards to start off with, which is never a good move.

Yeah, and it was, even though, you said it was quite a risky business strategy, probably was one of your better ideas, Martin, if I’m honest, wasn’t it?

Martin’s Crazy Business Ideas

Yeah.

Because Martin, bless him, when I first met him, he had every business idea under the sun.

Of course. That’s how businesses start. I wouldn’t be here today, if I hadn’t come up with random ideas that never would’ve worked.

Yeah, no they were terrible. Please if you do ever run into Martin, just ask him about the business idea, karaoke toilets. That was one of his worst-

Moving on. Moving on.

… Business ideas that he’s ever come up with. But yeah, this one was actually, even though you said it was a difficult one, it was probably one of your better ones to begin with, Martin.

Thank you.

So why did it fail? That’s the ultimate question. Why did this business fail? And why did the website not work?

I think a lot of the reasons why it didn’t work were basically based on our lack of research. So our actual approach to hiring a web designer was pretty quick. We didn’t do an awful lot of kind of asking friends and family for recommendations. We looked around at a few local businesses, and we hired somebody who had the best looking website. I blame you for that actually ’cause you were kind of the more aesthetic one, so-

Yeah, I was hooked in by the prettiness of it.

But that’s a mistake that I think a lot of people make. You potentially look at the web designers that have the glossiest website, and we actually hired somebody who was fine. I mean he was a nice guy. We got along with him very well. Nothing to do with him. It’s just that if we’d had done more research, if we would’ve spend more spent, we’d have potentially gone with somebody else.

Doing Your Research Before Hiring a Web Designer

Yeah, definitely. I completely agree with that. I think what advice anyone now is to do their research before they actually hire a web designer, but we were just really excited. We kinda jumped into the process. But I think the major problem was that we had this mentality of if we invested in this web designer who had a really glossy website and had built other websites that were nice and looked nice before, then if he built ours, then people would flock to it. We’d get loads of customers, wouldn’t we? And we kind of had this “build it and they will come” mentality, which was probably one of our biggest mistakes, wasn’t it? We just kind of thought, “Do you know what? We just have to throw some money at this, and then all will be fine.”

Yeah, exactly. And like I say, it was a nice process. There was nothing wrong with it or anything, but we invested all of our money in that, so essentially what we did is we saved up so much, and we’d already got lots of stock piling up in our spare room, and we spent the rest of our money on this web designer. And we didn’t have anything left, so in our minds, we were like, “Well, I’ve gotten nothing left, so this has to work.” And we didn’t have a leg to stand on.

No, no. Definitely. I think it was a combination of having this mentality of, “We just need to have a pretty and functioning website, and that’s all we need. And this is the last penny that we’re investing, so it has to work.” And two of those things kind of really collided, didn’t they? And kind of ended up in a disaster. And yeah, having no back up funds, no money for extra marketing, just no money for food in some cases was not a good place to be. We really exposed ourselves, didn’t we? And it wasn’t great.

And this is why we advise people now to not hire a web designer with a brand new business because we should have built a website ourselves. We should have tried to do it ourselves. Maybe even if we really struggled, actually hired a cheaper web designer that perhaps didn’t design websites as nice as this other agency, but at least we could put one foot in front of the other and protect ourselves a little bit more. We kind of just went in at the roof level and just said, “We’re gonna throw it all, and it’s just gonna happen to just start throwing money out of the screen of our computer because we’ve paid this money in, and we want the money back.”

Yeah, definitely. And I think this is something we actually talk about in episode one of our podcast. The first episode that we wanted to say was, “Don’t invest loads of money in a web designer, especially if you’re a new business because-”

And now you know why.

Exactly. That is due to our own, not even our client’s experience, but our own experience. We never want someone to go through that themselves because it really did leave us really financially vulnerable for quite a long time, didn’t it?

Getting the Right Support from Your Web Designer

Yeah, exactly. And it is a struggle. But aside from that also, again we don’t think that this web designer was probably right for us, as well. I mean, yes, if a big company was to hire him, and they’d get a nice glossy website, that’s fantastic, but we actually needed quite a bit of support, and it’s not his fault. It’s our fault for not doing the research, but when it comes to support, we didn’t know anything about how to update the framework that he’d given us and how to optimize our website for search engines, things like that. We didn’t have the tools to be able to really make the most of our website that we’d spent a lot of money in and invested in.

Exactly. We didn’t have the tools that you said, and we didn’t have the time to sort of learn all that stuff either. Especially after the website went live, we were like, “We just need the money back now,” but we didn’t have the time to actually think, “Well, what do we need to do to learn to make this website a success?” We just expected it to come back straight away.

And I think, yeah, the web designer, it’s absolutely nothing of his fault at all, but we did need that extra support. It was built on a platform called … It was OpenCart?

That’s the one. Boo.

Boo. Booing it. But it was really difficult for us to use, wasn’t it?

Yeah. If any of you have used that platform in the past, you’ll know exactly what we’re talking about, but it’s not the most search engine friendly. The URLs that they create are just horrible, and it’s really difficult to optimize it. And that’s why we’re very particular these days about the framework that we use, and we have to trust it. If somebody came to us and said, “I’d give you 50,000 pounds to build a website in OpenCart,” I don’t think I’d be able to sleep at night taking someone’s money and actually creating a website like that. And it’s partly due to the fact that we didn’t have a choice. We just got the platform that we got given.

But we didn’t even research, did we?

No.

Researching What Platform Your Site is Built On

I don’t think we were even aware that there were differences, but certainly, we didn’t do our research about what platform to use for a shopping website or even what platform to use for a website. We would always tell people to do their research first and find out platform actually works for them. But yes, for us, that was a real struggle, and we spent our time, rather than actually learning how to market our business, how to do better with our website, we spent our time just learning the nitty gritty bits of how to organize postage and how to do all these little things that were really complicated. And it was just a lot of work. A lot of evenings, weekends actually spent just doing that, while we were losing money essentially on the website itself.

And what we really needed at that point was just a lot of traffic. We just needed to try and drive as much traffic to our website as possible, and we didn’t have the time to do that because we were focusing on the nitty-gritty parts of managing the website. But that for the most part, would’ve solve a lot of problems. If we’d had spent more time promoting it on social media, maybe focused on learning more about SEO, which we didn’t have a clue about at the time, then we could’ve still moved forward, but I think it was just such a big weight on our shoulders with the money that we’d invested, and we just wanted it to work. And it was just a real struggle.

But I do think, if we’d of had a website buyers guide, for instance like what we’ve created, then we would’ve been able to protect ourselves to a certain extent, and we would’ve potentially hired another agency, and we’d of had a better mentality really about going into a business and accepting that “Build and they will come” was going to just miraculously happen, probably wouldn’t have been the case.

Yeah, definitely. And I will put a link to the website buyers guide in the notes because it’s useful for anyone who wants to get a new website or redesign their website. We don’t recommend us, by the way, but it’s a guide for you, if you’re shopping around for a website, so it’s really useful.

Yeah. We spent quite a lot of time on that because we wanted you to be able to avoid making the same mistake that we did. That was one of the big drivers for it.

Getting Traffic to the Site

Yeah, definitely. So just talking as well, when the website went live, we didn’t get, as Martin mentioned, any traffic to it at all. We really struggled. And we had this mentality that once it was built, it would just magically get traffic. We were quite naïve about that. And I remember you coming home one day from work, and I was going, “I’ve heard of this thing called SEO, and I think it’s quite interesting actually. I think this stuff works, but I don’t understand any of it. Will you help me with it?” And that was kind of the first time we’d ever heard of SEO, wasn’t it?

Yeah, and then what we did is obviously … ‘Cause we’re quite positive at that point. We just launched, and went to web designer, and we said, “SEO. What can we do? How can we do it?” And he said, “Oh, well. It’s expensive. If you want us to do it, it’s gonna cost this much.” I think he quoted it at over a thousand pound a month that some clients pay for SEO.

For us then, may have well been a million pounds, really. It was just impossible.

Yeah, it was impossible for us to be able to invest even a couple of hundred pounds a month, never mind that much. So it was a real struggle, and that was really deflating, especially because that’s when he decided to tell us, “Well, you’re in a very competitive niche,” which was an even bigger blow because it meant that even if we did optimize our website, it’d still be a real struggle because we were trying to optimize for unique gifts or home furnishings or cushions or whatever it is that we were selling at that point. So it was a real kind of de-motivator at that point to know that we’d spent all this money on this website, and it was a real struggle. It felt like we were at the bottom of a mountain, didn’t it?

Yeah, it did. And I don’t think it was his responsibility to tell us, “You know, you’re in a really competitive industry.” We’re selling cushions, so we could’ve realized really that we were in a competitive industry, but yes, I think it was just this naivety that we sort of took to actually doing the website.

Yeah, definitely. And that’s something, I think, we need to discuss a little bit, as well. Sometimes, we actually let our excitement for the business, and Lyndsay’s passion for these owl cushions that we just had an abundance of.

I loved the owl … I miss the owl cushions.

That we actually went sort of too fast because we were so excited about the business, which it sounds like a good thing, but actually it can lead you to make the wrong business decisions, hence hiring a web designer at the point when we didn’t necessarily need to. We believed in the products so much, and our enthusiasm would just sort of take us to be a successful business, and we could live on a beach. That kind of business model.

Our Naive Outlook to the Work Involved

With cocktails, selling owl cushions and being millionaires.

Yes, it’s all done to our naivety, and the fact that we didn’t realize how much work it would be to be able to build a website and grow the website. And I think that’s the thing. You think that the website is everything. You think it’s going to just generate business, but it is means to an end really.

Yeah. Yeah, I always say that the website is not the end. It’s the beginning. Getting a new website is just the beginning of your business, and we viewed as the end. “That was it. That was all we needed. We were going to be a success.” No, it’s actually the beginning of everything because a website is the heart of your business, but you’ve still got to kind of pump blood to it in a way. You’ve got to make sure that you’re building a business on it. You’ve got to get traffic to it. And we didn’t understand any of that, really. We were just selling a product that was available on Amazon, on Ebay, on hundreds, probably thousands of other websites, as well, and we didn’t really give anyone a reason to buy from us, did we?

No, we didn’t differentiate ourselves. We were trying to compete on price. There was no benefit from hiring us, or buying from us, rather than buying off Ebay, and you could probably even get it a bit cheaper. So the profit margins weren’t there because we were competing on price. We were too scared to do any kind of content at all. We were brand new to social media marketing at this point, and we barely even touched Facebook. But again, we had that encouragement. We didn’t mind getting out of there.

I remember the day when we went to a park with all our products and decided to take photographs of them. Like with the little owl cushions, we’d put them in trees-

Well, we had owl cushions. We had lion cushions. We had monkeys. Yeah, so we did some really fun stuff, didn’t we?

We enjoyed it.

Yeah, like Martin said, we went to the park, and we even stopped at a zebra crossing, and we put our owls on the zebra crossing, like on the cover of a Beatles album, I think it was, and we tried to emulate it. And yeah, we took pictures. We gave all the owls their own names. We made poems for them.

She’s very proud of the name thing. I don’t know.

And I am very proud of the names because the supplier actually stole that from us, I’m sure.

She still says that. It’s true. They didn’t have names before, and they did after.

They didn’t, and then they had names afterwards.

And our names were better, I think.

Our names were really good, yeah.

Sebastian the lion cushions.

Sebastian the lion cushion, yeah.

It was a very fun business.

It was.

Not Everyone is as Excited as You

It was exciting, and I think that’s why we let our hearts rule our heads. And that’s why because we were so enthusiastic about it, we just assumed that the world would be, as well. And it’s not the case, and that’s why it’s really important that you have a strategy behind how you’re going to market your business once the website is done. And like Lyndsay said, the website is just the starting line. It’s not the end line. And by considering what your buyers might want, it’s a good place to start on your content marketing. Literally, your website is such a fraction of the effort in your business, that as long as the website’s set up a certain way, and it’s built to convert people, and it’s built to attract search engine traffic as well, then the rest of the effort goes into the marketing and the promotion and writing helpful blog posts and going down the real kind of nooks and crannies really of content marking.

Getting Obsessed with the Small Detail

Yeah, and I think the biggest mistake that we also made … There was lots. There’s lots of biggest mistakes we also made. Was probably that we were so obsessed with the website and how each little bit looked, so we thought, “Oh, we could move that bit down there. Or we could change the color of that button. Or we could make that slightly bigger.” And we got so obsessed with the details, but like what we said what we really needed was to do content marketing. We needed to drive traffic to the website because changing those little details is pretty useless ’cause no one was on the website anyway, apart from my mom. Thanks Mom. She went on the website. I think she pity bought a product, which is never a good place to be.

So yeah, it was a struggle. So from what we’ve learned from this whole process, what would you advise people to do in future if they were going to get a new website?

I think the website buyer’s guide is going to help. I know it’s our product. We don’t get anything. We’re not selling it to you, but we definitely put it together to avoid this kind of scenario. So definitely check it out. But the research mentality is so important. Try and take your heart out of it. Try and use your head when you’re making buying decisions in general, never mind when you’re hiring a web designer. But if you are brand new, then try doing it yourself first. We’re never going to stop teaching this. Try doing it yourself first, get on Shopify, or try and launch a WordPress template that comes with the shop. Just try and do it yourself first. See how far you get. If you struggle and you’re having problems with it, then try and find someone that can help you move forward one step at a time. Don’t just go straight to step ten, which is pay over a thousand pound for your brand new website with a brand new business that you’ve not been able to validate yet.

Yeah, definitely. And we’re not just talking about shopping sites either. We’re actually talking about all websites. Obviously, it’s a bit more complicated with a shopping website, but I think this applies to all new business. Make sure you do that research first ’cause it’s not just shopping websites that are complicated. Web design itself is very, very complicated, so make sure that you do that research and, yeah, that buyers guide should be able to help you.

And don’t use OpenCart.

And I think another thing would be, like you’ve touched upon Martin, is don’t invest when you shouldn’t. So we made a bad financial decision, and that is on us that we invested every single penny that we had into a website, and that kind of made us put everything into this website. And it felt like life or death, didn’t it? And it’s really not a good place to be. If you’re-

No, and it definitely ended in death. Flat lined completely.

Yeah, definitely. And I think if you’re finding yourself struggling to pay for a website, it’s not a good time to invest in it. We would never ever want a client that was not financially comfortable giving us their money. It would just be horrible, and it’s not a nice place to be.

No, it’s okay if you’ve already got a business, and you’ve generated it. Like go back and listen to episode one, if you’re concerned about whether or not you should or shouldn’t invest. But if you’ve already got a business, and it’s established, and you’re already getting customers, then yes, maybe at some point, you need to think about hiring a web designer. But with a brand new business, it’s a very risky tactic, especially if you’ve got three or four thousand on a credit card for these piling owl cushions.

Yeah, definitely. And finally, I think it’s just to understand and have the mentality that once the website is built, that’s when the work starts, that’s when your content marketing has to start, that’s when you have to think about CEO, social media marketing, email marketing, all these kind of things. You need to start getting blood to the heart really. You need to just start getting traffic and conversions, and that doesn’t just happen on a website. That requires a lot of work itself.

And we don’t want to put people off, but we don’t want to lie to you or tell you that it’s easy because it’s not. It’s not easy, but it is worthwhile doing it and learning this stuff, as well.

Yeah, and we never want to be the kind of podcast hosts that just kinda tell you that it’s all sunshine and rainbows. And that’s kinda why we wanted to kinda break it down a little bit and tell you that we’ve been in the same position that potentially you’re in right now, or have been in the past. And it’s all about us being open and honest about it, so that if you are in that position, don’t beat yourself up about it. We made the same mistake, as well. We’re just here to hopefully prevent other people from making that mistake, as well.

A Positive Outlook to Failure

Yeah, we cannot possibly look back and think, “This is a bad thing.” We never look back now and think, “That was awful,” because it led on to so many different things because in the process, we learned so much more about web design, we learnt everything about SEO during the process and conversions, content marketing, all those different things. We actually learnt so much from it, but we also learnt what it was like to be a customer buying a website. It’s been absolutely priceless in growing our own agency because we kind of understand how you guys feel, and we’re able to provide this advice like “Don’t invest thousands straight away, if you’re a brand new business, and this is all the money that you’ve got.”

Yeah, and we obviously try to be as supportive as we can, as well. So we send training videos and lots of help for resources to be able to help businesses grow, and that’s something that we don’t feel that we got, so that’s something that we’ve learnt that we’re able to give back now.

Yeah, definitely. Usually after we’ve built a website, we have like an hour with the client, don’t we? Where we say, “Okay, this is the kind of stuff you could possibly do to sort of grow your website further,” isn’t it? But it’s definitely not something where I look back and think, “I wish that would have had happened,” because without it happening, we wouldn’t be where we are today. So I definitely do regret it one bit, but it was fun.

But I think how we reacted to that disappointment is what really changed things for us and how we could’ve looked at it in a negative light and thought, “You know what? We tried doing a business. It’s rubbish. You can’t do it. I’d rather just get a normal job.” We truly believed in the life that we wanted to live, and that didn’t involve working for another company. So yes, it didn’t work this time, but we kept going on that road, and we pushed forward, and we then launched our very first web design business and got out first clients, and immediately, we saw the benefit of the failure that we’d lived through.

Yeah, definitely. And we’re still learning now. We learn every day all new things, and we keep investing in learning, isn’t it? Because it’s just so important that you do. I mean we never ever stop learning, and everything is an opportunity to learn, even the massive failures. So this got really all philosophical, didn’t it now [inaudible 00:26:11]?

I’m glad you was able to pull that word off. Let’s hope you don’t have to say phenomenal ’cause you-

No, don’t make me say that word. Pheno … Can we edit that out please?

Never. Never been able to say that. No.

He’s not going to let me edit that out.

No chance.

So I hope you found that useful and not too negative because like we said, we did bring some positives from the experience, and I hope that you were able to hopefully learn from our mistakes at least. So before we go, don’t forget to register for our SEO webinar on the sixth of September. Like we said, there are limited spaces available, so make sure you get your name down for that. You can’t access it without actually giving us your email address, and then we’ll send you an unique link. Make sure you turn up early because we do have limited spaces, so make sure you get a space, and we’ll see you next time on the Make Your Mark Online Podcast.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Ep 9 – Why Our First Website Failed Miserably appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Tone of voice might not sound like the sexiest of topics, but it’s vital that personal brands get it right.

In this episode, we look at how you can add some personality to your writing. It may be a ‘fluffy’ subject, but we give some actionable tips that you can use straight away for your website content.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • What is tone of voice and why is it important?
  • Why tone of voice is important for personal brands
  • How to hone in on your brand personality
  • Whether you should take a formal or informal approach to writing
  • Why you should have an opinion
  • Having your own set of branded words and phrases
  • Humour – when it works and when it doesn’t
  • Whether you should write in 3rd or 1st person

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

1.06 – What is tone of voice?
5.05 – Uncovering your brand personality
5.35 – What words describe you?
7.17 – Thinking about your audience
8.30 – Writing for your target market
9.26 – Informal vs formal – what route should you take
12.00 – How having an opinion helps your tone of voice
13.10 – Branded words and phrases
14.53 – Using humour in your writing
17.05 – Should you write in 3rd or 1st person?
18.54 – Final tip – record yourself

Useful Resources and Links

Ann Handley ‘Everybody Writes’

Andrew and Pete: Atomic Course

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Episode Transcript Below

Martin: So Lyndsay, tone of voice.

Lyndsay: Yes.

Martin: It sounds like it’s one of those marketing things.

Lyndsay: Sounds like something I’ve made up.

Martin: It does. Yeah. So tone of voice. I mean, we’re talking about websites. We’re talking about SEO. We’re talking about conversions. So we’re talking about tangible stuff.

Lyndsay: Yes.

Martin: What is tone of voice, and how does that fit in with everything?

What is tone of voice?

Lyndsay: Well that’s a very good question. So yeah. We’re obviously talking about it in a business context. So your tone of voice is essentially your personality. It’s how you come across, and it’s what people hear when they read your words. So if you’ve ever read a novel, or even if you’ve read someone’s website content or email, sometimes you just get a real strong voice in your head of what they sound like. That’s tone of voice, and that’s what, as personal brands, we’re really trying to achieve when we’re writing, through our writing, particularly on our website. But it’s not just obviously on your website that you need to be conscious of your tone of voice. It’s also in emails, on your social media, even on your 404 pages. You need to have that in mind. At all times, you’re communicating with your audience.

Martin: Right. So it’s like any words on our website, we need to be thinking about how we are writing. So even if it’s like headlines and stuff like that. That’s what you’re talking about is it?

Lyndsay: Yeah. I mean, it’s anything, any communication on your website, so all the copy, all the words on your website, yes. You should be thinking about your tone of voice.

Lyndsay: Now, that sounds a little bit scary. But a lot of time, when you start, it does become quite natural. Just as we’re speaking now. You know, you don’t think when you speak how much you sound. It’s not a conscious effort. We need to get to that level when we’re writing really. So yeah.

Martin: Okay. Okay.

Lyndsay: It will get easier. But it’s worth thinking about it in the beginning.

Martin: That makes sense. Well is it really that important? I mean, isn’t it interesting enough for us to have words on our website that tell people what we do or give educational information away. Is it that important, do you think?

Lyndsay: I mean yeah, if you wanna be boring.

Martin: Okay. Yeah. I see your point.

Lyndsay: And I do say this quite a lot. Unfortunately, as personal brands, I do find that tone of voice is probably more important to you guys than it is to maybe other businesses. I think it’s important to every business, but particularly for personal brands. Because tone of voice allows you to be authentic. It allows the reader to really connect with you. And it inspires the reader to take action, all things that we need to do as personal brands. So we really need to have that connection with someone.

Martin: Okay. Okay. So, are you saying that it’s like coming across more like a friend or more professional, or what are you actually, what’s the , what are we aiming for?

Lyndsay: So that’s a really interesting question actually, and there are different approaches that you can take. But yes. I always think that when you’re looking at your tone of voice, you know, you really want your reader to be able to connect with you as if they’re having a conversation with you in like a café or something like that. They really want that feeling of intimacy. And it’s also about being recognizable as well. So, I mean, in the great words of writing guru [inaudible 00:04:14], if the label fell off your content, would people know it was you? And that’s such a great summary of really tone of voice. Because you want people to recognize who you are. That’s so important to us as personal brands. So I think that’s another great reason why tone of voice is so important.

Martin: Okay. So about being relatable, and being authentic, and recognizable.

Lyndsay: Yes. Exactly.

Martin: Okay. So let’s just say we’re, we’ve bought into this tone of voice thing. We’re ready to move forward, and-

Lyndsay: Yes. We’ve convinced everyone.

Martin: We’ve convinced ourselves. And how do you actually find it? Because you’re saying stuff like authentic and things like that. What’s the best way to go about it?

Lyndsay: So how do you find it? It’s not down the sofa. How do you find your tone of voice? Well-

Martin: Is it a free online tool.

Lyndsay: Yeah. That’s the tricky thing. It is difficult to kind of pinpoint. But the first thing you need to look at is, you can’t find your tone of voice without knowing your brand personality and without knowing who your audience are. So that’s one thing that I would say that you need to know before you think about your tone of voice.

Martin: Okay. Okay. So work out who your audience is. So speak to them on their level really.

Lyndsay: Yeah.

Martin: As if you were in the room with them, you started having a chat, maybe on a call with them. That kind of thing really.

Lyndsay: Yeah. Absolutely.

Martin: But what about if you’re not sure about what personality you should have? Maybe you start and you have a brand new business, and you wanna write your own content. Maybe you can’t afford to pay somebody else right away. How can you latch into that authenticity really? It sounds so weird. It’s like, how do you teach someone to be authentic? Well, I don’t know.

Lyndsay: It’s very, very difficult. But I mean, really, you need to think about firstly, what is your personality? So, as a personal brand, there’s usually a link between our own personal personalities, who we are day to day, and our business. Not always. But generally, I think 90% of the time that there is.

Martin: Yeah.

Lyndsay: So I think you need to think about who you are as a personal brand. And what I always, what we always say to clients, when they come to us for web design, is what actual words describe you as a business? And I would say what words describe you as a personal brand? Now, are you sarcastic? Are you witty? Are you serious? You sweet, bold, humble? Think of words-

Martin: Geeky.

Lyndsay: Geeky. Yep. That’s one of ours. Yeah, geeky, and all that I would say is avoid the usual professional and friendly, because well yes.

Martin: Yeah. A bit blasé aren’t they?

Lyndsay: It’s not as if you’re going to say, “Well I’m really unprofessional. I’m really unfriendly.”

Martin: Yeah.

Lyndsay: Think about real words that actually apply to you, and you know, and what you stand for. And I mean, it’s a very, very basic way of really honing in on your brand personality and there’s a lot more in depth that you can do. But that’s a very basic way initially that you can hone in on what kind of personality that you have. Pick three key words that describe you. And that will give you a sense then of what kind of tone of voice to go after.

Martin: Okay. So that’s a good tip. That’s a good place for people to start. Do you have any more tools or tips to be able to use along with that one?

Lyndsay: Yeah. I think one thing I would say, one caveat to that is that you then have to think about your audience. So what will they respond to? So we had a client recently who said that she was really sweet and bubbly, feminine, girly. And that was great. But her audience was kind of men between 45 and I think it was 64.

Martin: Yeah.

Lyndsay: And very serious, suit wearing, briefcase carrying type people. It was serious corporate clients that she was after. Now sometimes, that can be a bit of a disconnect there between your personality and the target audience you’re going after. So you need to make sure that it fits.

Martin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lyndsay: And generally, you will find that it will fit. I mean, the people that we attract, as Jammy Digital, are people kind of similar to us.

Martin: Yeah.

Lyndsay: Which is really nice. And you know, they kind of have similar values, and they appreciate similar , you know, kind of respond to our personality quite well.

Martin: Yeah.

Lyndsay: And vice versa. So just make sure that there isn’t that disconnect there.

Lyndsay: And another great tip is have your audience in front of you before you start writing. And what I mean is, not actually gather someone off the street and bring them in. That’d be a bit weird. But actually think about your audience. And we have something called a customer avatar, which you may have heard of, which is basically like a summary of who your actual target audience is. But have an idea of who they are. Write that person down. Give them a name. And give them qualities. And actually write that down, and have that in front of you before you start writing.

Lyndsay: So before you start writing, you can look at it, and go, “Okay, well I’m actually talking to Sarah now, who’s a mom of three. And she lives in Manchester. And she lives in this house. And these are our problems. And these are things she’s struggling with. And I’m going to talk to her now directly.” And that’s a really helpful way before you start writing to think about how you write to your audience.

Martin: Okay. Yeah. That’s a nice one. Anything else you can think of?

Lyndsay: So another good tip is to think about how informal or formal you want to be. Now this is kind of a very basic way, but it’s a very easy way to think about how you approach your writing. So when we sit down and write, we automatically think or feel like we’re at school again, don’t we? And we’re like, Dear Sir or Madame. We go extremely formal, even though we’re quite informal in real life situations, maybe when we talk to our clients, when we talk to our customers. We can be quite informal. You know, you actually chat to them on the phone, you can be informal. But as soon as we start writing, I think our backs get up.

Martin: Yeah.

Lyndsay: We go all stuffy. And I think you need to decide how informal or formal you want to be. I always use this example of an accountancy firm. So you automatically think every accountancy firm must be really formal and professional, and you associate them with them wearing suits and being very serious.

Martin: Yep.

Lyndsay: But imagine if you were in accountancy firm that just wrote, you know, “Does the day January 31st make, you know, scare you? Does it give you sweaty palms?”

Martin: Scare the crap out of you.

Lyndsay: Maybe not scare the crap out of you. But I nearly said that. Yeah. “Does it give you sweaty palms? Well, pop in to see us. We’ll pop a kettle on. We’ll go through your accounts with you. We’ll get it sorted. And you know, you’ll be on your way. And we’ll help you through it.”

Martin: Yeah. No force.

Lyndsay: Exactly. There’s no need to go really formal. And if your target audience is going to respond to that. I would certainly respond to that.

Martin: Yeah.

Lyndsay: Much better than some a stuffy language. Then that’s going to appeal to much more to your target audience than being uber professional all of the time. So I think it’s a good idea to decide how formal or informal you want to be from the beginning and tailor your copy around that. But generally, as personal brands, I would say you’re more on the informal side generally.

Martin: Yeah. And it’s a great way to differentiate yourself. So if you notice that, if you are a speaking coach, and you teach people how to present on stage, if everybody is wearing a suit, and everybody is saying things like learned the skills to present yourself in the best possible way. And then somebody else just stands out from the crowd and says, “Listen, you wanna speak? You wanna impact the world. You wanna have a successful business? Then let’s jump on a 15-minute Skype call.” You know, I mean that kind of approach is kind of what you’re talking about with the accountant.

Lyndsay: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, if you’re still struggling, think about how you’d actually talk to your target market if you were to give them an email. And so what would you say? What would be the first thing you’d say? Would you say, “Dear Ms. Cambridge?” Would you say, “Hi Lyndsay. Hello Lyndsay. ‘Sup Lyndsay.” Even though no one’s said ‘Sup since 1995. But you know what I mean?

Martin: Prince of Bel Air. That counts, doesn’t it?

Lyndsay: Yeah. But you know what I mean. How would you actually greet that person? And then you can think about, “Okay, well I’d probably be more on the informal side. I definitely wouldn’t put, “Dear Ms. Cambridge.” So why are you talking like that on your website? And so yeah. You tailor it around that really. But that’s really a basic idea of it.

Martin: Okay. Great. Fantastic. So have an opinion as well, I suppose. That’s kind of similar thing.

Lyndsay: Yeah. And I mean, having an opinion is a great way to bring out our natural voice. Because when we have strong feelings for something, our natural voice does come out. And it comes out quite strongly. And we always say to personal brands, you have to have an opinion. Don’t sit on the fence and be boring. So if you have an opinion through your writing, then say it. And when you do actually write it, you will find that your natural voice does actually come out. Definitely.
Martin: Okay. Anything else you can think of?

Lyndsay: Well, there’s quite a few things really. There’s, so what phrase and words can be associated with you? So this is actually something I got from atomic, who, if you’ve not hear of, they actually run, it’s actually run by some great people called Andrew and Pete. So they-

Martin: Great lads.

Lyndsay: Yes. They are amazing.

Martin: Check them out. We’ll put the link in the show notes.

Lyndsay: Yeah. Definitely. But basically in their course, they talk about branded content. But you can take this more widely too, just any content on your website. Essentially it’s about having words and phrases branded towards you, towards you and your brand. So they are really associated with you. So their example is, they always say, have you got content crickets, which basically mean, you know, is no one looking at your content. Now, the phrase content crickets is essentially their own. No one else uses it, and everyone knows as soon as you hear content crickets, you think Andy and Pete. And people, it’s amazing actually how much people pick this up, and they start saying it themselves. And automatically, you’ve got loads of people actually saying your phrase that you’ve actually made from absolutely nothing.

Lyndsay: So that’s another good tip. Think about phrases and key words that you can use, that can be applied just to your service, and just to you, and that when people say then, or when people hear them or see them, they think, “Oh, that’s such a body, because I recognize it from them, and that’s what they say all the time.”

Martin: Yeah. Okay. So that’s a really good point. And we’ll have to really think about doing stuff like that for our business as well.

Lyndsay: Yeah. Absolutely.

Martin: Lot of these little key phrases that people can latch onto. It’s a really good idea. So, what about, ’cause Andrew and Pete, they’re really funny as well, aren’t they? So that’s-

Lyndsay: They are. They’re hilarious.

Martin: … a really good thing.

Lyndsay: Yeah. Check them out.

Martin: And some other peoples or some other businesses manage to really pull the funny thing off. So could we, thinking about tone of voice, could we include a little bit of humour if that’s kind of what relationship we have with our clients?

Lyndsay: Absolutely. I think that humour is, it’s one of those key ways that you can, if you feel confident with it, you can actually pull off a really strong tone of voice if you do use humour. So, firstly, you need to decide, okay, do you want to be funny? Is that something that you are naturally? Does it come naturally to you, because there’s nothing worse than forced humour. It’s kind of like David Cameron calling you mate or something.

Martin: Oh God.

Lyndsay: It just feels wrong.

Martin: I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Lyndsay: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, when it’s like, you know, when it’s not suited to you, and it’s awkward, then your audience will feel awkward. So there’s nothing wrong if you don’t want to use humor. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. But just, if you do, just make sure it’s something that actually does come naturally to you, and it’s not, yeah, it’s not an uncomfortable David Cameron calling you mate moment.

Martin: Yeah. So it’s about relating your personality, it fits for you, but it also fits with your clients as well.

Lyndsay: Yeah. Exactly. Yes. And that’s a really, really good point, Martin. It has to fit with your clients. So I’m naturally very, very dark humoured.

Martin: She is.

Lyndsay: I am. Yeah. And I’m not sure how actually that would, how our audience would respond to that. So I do avoid that really. I don’t have much dark humour in my writing, because I’m not entirely sure how my audience would respond to that. And if you’re not sure, then it’s best to err on the side of caution. But certainly think about the type of humour that you want to use, if you do want to use it. So do you want to be witty? Do you wanna use banter? Do you wanna use slapstick? You know, you can do any type of thing. And a lot of the time, this will just come naturally to you, because this is how you naturally are in real life. You just have to think about it when you’re writing. But just make sure you know that you’re confident that your audience will respond to it quite well.

Martin: Okay. That’s a good point. Okay. So I’ve got a question. Might come as a little bit of a curve ball. But should we be writing in first person then, or third person? ‘Cause you see some websites do one way, some websites do it another way. How can we integrate tone of voice within those two options, or do you recommend both?

Lyndsay: Yeah. That’s a really interesting question. And I always say write in first person.

Martin: Okay.

Lyndsay: Especially if you’re a personal brand. There is absolutely no reason why you should be writing in third person at all. You are your business. You are the face of your business. You are what people are buying into. You’re the one actually talking to the reader. So there’s no point saying, “Mark Smith does this and does that, and has qualified with a Master’s Degree from blah, blah, blah.” It just, it just sounds terrible. It’s-

Martin: It does sound terrible.

Lyndsay: Yes. It does. I probably made it sound terrible on purpose. But you get the picture. It really doesn’t, it just fails to connect with the reader. And you find this in , you know, it goes back to say, if you look at novel writing, and whether people, you know, authors are like, “Should I choose the third person? Should I choose first?” There’s always advantages and disadvantages of both. But they do say first person always connects with the reader better-

Martin: Okay.

Lyndsay: ‘Cause they get inside your mind. They understand you a lot more, and they can hear your voice a lot better.
Martin: And that is kind of that thing where you sat in a room, you speak to your client, you know-

Lyndsay: Yeah.

Martin: It’s very first person, isn’t it?

Lyndsay: Exactly.

Martin: Okay. So that’s a really interesting topic actually. I mean, we probably gone on longer than I thought we were gonna go on, ’cause I’m interested in it as well with you being the writer. Any final tips? I mean, is there anything really? I just wanna soak up as much knowledge as we can, and help our listeners out.

Lyndsay: Yeah. I mean, I think if you’re still struggling, and it is something that’s hard to wrap your head around initially. If you’re still struggling, then when you have a conversation next with your client or your customer, just, as long as it’s within GDPR rules, hit a record button. Record yourself talking. Because this is something I do. When we come to write web copy for clients, which we sometimes do, I don’t send our clients a, you know, a form to fill in about all services and things like that. I call them up. And then I listen to them get excited about the services that they offer, about the products that they offer. And when you do that, you actually hear your own tone of voice. You hear how authentic you are, how excited you are, what kind of things that you actually say. And you hear yourself. And then that makes it much easier to write. So next time you actually talk to a client, just record yourself, and you’ll be able to then identify your tone of voice, because it’s really, really simple and easy, because you actually do it every day. You just don’t know. It’s just that when we come to write, we kind of stiffen up and forget everything all together. So record yourself. And that’s a really easy way of grasping how you come across to your clients, and how you should come across to your readers on your website.

Martin: I think that’s my favorite tip.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Ep 4 – How To Find Your Tone of Voice appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

We go back to basics in this episode by covering what’s really important and dispelling some common SEO myths.

[bctt tweet=”SEO isn’t rocket science, it’s just about providing your user with the best possible experience.” username=”@Jammy_Digital”]

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • • Is SEO is dead?
    • How can we, as personal brands, compete with huge companies?
    • How going niche can help your SEO
    • How to optimise for the services you offer
    • Why ‘big keywords’ aren’t all they’re cracked up to be
    • How to use content marketing to boost your SEO
    • Why the rule ‘300 words per page’ doesn’t work
    • Is it worth paying a company to do SEO?
    • The dangers of cheap SEO agencies

  Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

  0.54 – What is SEO?
  2.14 – Is SEO still relevant?
  4.43 – How can we compete against big companies in search results?
  5.50 – Niching your business and the benefits to SEO
  7.50 – Why you need access to your entire site for SEO
  9.12 – Don’t just focus on your homepage
  10.49 – Think about optimising for all your services
  11.33 – What we mean when we say keyword
  13.41 – How content marketing can improve your SEO
  15.36 – How to conduct keyword research for content ideas
  17.39 – How to optimise your posts and pages
  21.58 – Should you hire an SEO agency?

  Useful Resources and Links

  KWFinder (Keyword research tool) 

  Yoast SEO Plugin 

  SEO for Blog Posts

  What To Do Next

  Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

  If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), conversion rate optimisation (CRO), content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

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  If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

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  Episode Transcript Below

  Lyndsay: So, the first question I have, really, Martin, is what is SEO? Because there’s a lot of information out there on the Internet about SEO, but it can all be a bit confusing, can’t it?

  Martin: Yeah, it’s not the easiest topic for people to just jump into, really, partly because there’s so much information out there, like you said. But, I just want people to be aware that when it comes to SEO, we’re just talking about online visibility. We’re talking about getting more traffic to your website. We’re talking about not having to pay for advertising, necessarily. That’s kind of what we’re talking about when we talk about SEO.

  Martin: More specifically, though, we’re talking about search engines like Google. So, when somebody goes to Google and types in your name, or your business name, or any keyword based around your topic of expertise, that is kind of what people want to rank for on search engines. And they always want to rank on the first page, because-

  Lyndsay: Obviously.

  Martin: … that gets most of the traffic. So that’s what we’re talking about, really.

  Martin: And there are a number of things that you can do on your website to be able to increase your chances of ranking highly in search results, like Google, like Bing, like Yahoo, because they are valuable as well, it’s just that Google have a huge market share, which is why so many people focus on ranking highly on Google.

  Is SEO Dead?

  Lyndsay: Yeah, okay. So, why is it important? Because I have seen a lot of things where people said, you know, SEO is dead, or SEO just doesn’t work anymore. I mean, is it still important? Is it something we should be focusing on?

  Martin: I think it’s as important as me saying to you, if you were to look for a product, or a service, or maybe you wanted to go on Holiday, what would you do? You’d probably go to Google. You’d probably type in cheap flights, or you’d probably type in hotels in Florida. Hopefully, anyway, with Star Wars Land coming out that’s what you’ll be typing in. That would be nice.

  Martin: But yeah, that’s what you do. It’s the first thing we all do. We like to research products and services before we buy anything. I mean, it’s just phenomenal how many people now rely on search as a trustworthy method, really, and that’s why it’s so important, because Google is the number one website in the world.

  Martin: Just shows that people, they don’t go on Facebook or Twitter to search for products or services. Yes, they may ask for recommendations from friends and family, but if you’ve got your credit card in your hand and you want to buy something, first place you go is Google, and then you might go to Amazon. So, it does matter, search matters, and making sure that your website appears higher up in search results is definitely going to have some impact on your business.

  User Experience and SEO – is there a difference?

  Lyndsay: Yeah, definitely. I think I agree with that, and when we get asked this question as well, there’s … We do get asked this question from clients quite a lot, , you know, should I do SEO? Should I focus on it? And generally there’s not that much different between SEO and just good user experience.

  Martin: Exactly, yeah.

  Lyndsay: So, if you deliver one, generally you’re delivering the other, aren’t you?

  Martin: Yeah, that’s what Google want at the end of the day, they want a nice experience for your user. They want to make sure that you’re reputable, and, generally speaking, it’s quite easy for Google to work out if you’re a reputable company if you’re showing up on the first page, most of the time, especially over the past few years, they’ve managed to get rid of a lot of spammy websites out there. Spammy, un-user friendly, horrible websites that don’t work on mobile devices.

  Martin: So, if you focus on users more than SEO rules, then generally you’re on the right path, and having a user experience mindset about what a great website would look like in the eyes of the user, you’re generally kind of the first step in ranking highly on search engines.

  Lyndsay: Yeah, absolutely, because it’s in, obviously, Google’s best interest to provide the best websites in their search results-

  Martin: Exactly, yeah.

  Lyndsay: … so it makes absolute sense.

  How do Personal Brands Compete With Big Companies in terms of SEO?

  Lyndsay: So, coming on to this next thing, I mean, we’re personal brands. We might be a one man band, or we might have a small team of people. You know, how do we compete with these huge companies? I mean, you know, a lot of personal brands sell books, for example. How are we going to compete with Amazon, you know, on Google, you know, in terms of their SEO power? How can we do that, how can we compete with huge companies?

  Martin: It’s a fair point, and it’s what holds people back when it comes to getting into SEO. And SEO can be as simple or as complicated as you like, but far too often people just look at the first page of Google, and they see Amazon, they see big companies like that advertising there and taking up all the top spots, and it’s like, oh, surely this would cost me thousands to hire a company to do, or lots and lots of man hours. Now, I just want to run my business, I don’t necessarily want to work out all of the technicalities to how to rank online.

  Martin: But, more often than not, there are reasons why Google, now, are favoring smaller businesses and smaller websites, because if you are a … Let’s just say that you are a property expert, for instance. You may think that the kind of the BBC property website might be the best place to go, and how are you going to outrank them?

  Martin: But if you specialize in a specific niche within that industry, and you focus all of your efforts on creating a website that’s interesting, and engaging, and valuable, with all of your rich content on there, then you are, in fact, more likely to rank on the first page of Google than some other companies out there that specialize in all of these massive, broad areas, because you’re super niche, and that’s what Google want.

  Martin: If you type in a question into Google, they want you to be able to answer that question, and if the big company aren’t answering that question, then … and you, you’re able to create a piece of content that answers that question better, then that’s what Google care about. Yes, they care about your, , how long your website’s been going, and how many visits did you get.

  Martin: But, ultimately, when you go to Google and you want an answer to a question, or you want a product to solve your problem, the best solution that Google find, it’s generally the one that they’ll put on the first page of Google. And that’s why it’s so much easier when you think about it from a content perspective, and providing answers, then you’ve got some power.

  Lyndsay: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I agree, I think with larger companies, they don’t have the advantage that small companies do have, because, like you said, if someone niches down to a really, really specific topic, which we always recommend that people niche down in their business, you know, they can really own that, whereas a large company probably tries to do a much broader overview of lots of different things. So, yeah, I think that is a really good advantage that small, personal brands do have in terms of SEO.

  Martin: Yeah, definitely.

  How Can Personal Brands Improve Their SEO?

  Lyndsay: Okay, so, what is it that we can do to improve our SEO on our website? Is there any easy tips you can give our listeners that can help them?

  Martin: Yeah, there are a few things that you can definitely do on a basic level, so you don’t have to get into any advanced strategies. One of them … Or before you actually do anything, you need to make sure you’ve got full access to your website. This means if your web designer is doing it for you, or you’ve got your cousin to do it for you, or maybe you’ve paid a big agency, make sure that you have access to edit the settings on every page, that’s the main thing.

  Lyndsay: Yeah, definitely, and I think we’ve found this with some of our clients that have actually come to us. One of the reasons people have actually come to us is because currently they didn’t have access to their whole website, so they were really limited in things that they could do in terms of, well, yeah, like SEO, or, you know, content marketing. And I think that’s one major tip that we would give people if they are searching for a web designer, is make sure you get full access, because it’s going to be really, really difficult for you to do things like SEO properly on your website.

  Martin: Yeah, it is one of the things that you should make sure of. Ask your web designer, or if they’ve already built your website, really, you need access, I mean-

  Lyndsay: Absolutely.

  Martin: … you do-

  Lyndsay: Absolutely.

  Martin: … you do. And part of the success of an SEO campaign, really, is just having access and following a simple set of rules, and that’s as simple as it is, really, when it comes to SEO.

  Martin: Now, once you’ve got access to your website, I want you to not put all of your eggs in one basket, and what I mean by that is don’t just focus all of your efforts on the home page. So, when we give people a set of rules to follow, yes, there are little, technical things that you can do on each page of your website, but most people just do the homepage. They write lots of content, they try and include all the keywords that they want to rank for, and that’s not the right way to go. That’s the kind of thing that happened 10 years ago, maybe.

  Martin: What I want you to do is to think about each individual page of your website being a website within itself. So, maybe you have coaching as a service, for instance, or maybe you have speaking as a service, imagine if you tried to include all of those keywords on your home page. It would just look a little bit crazy. It would look stuffy, it would look …
  
  Martin: I mean, you can include elements of them, obviously, which is a good thing, but if you’re trying to rank for all of these random different keywords and you’re only trying to rank your homepage, that’s a big as for Google to give you all that credit for all of those different keywords.

  Martin: So, our suggestion is always to create pages for those individual services and optimize them individually with a simple set of rules.

  Lyndsay: Okay, so, this is another thing we get asked, actually. So, say I’m, like, an editor or a proofreader, a lot of people just put all their services on one page. So, they might have a menu item and call it services, when you click on it, they might say, okay, I do editing, I do proofreading, I do coaching, and I do speaking, and then put a little bit of information about it.

  SEO: Do You Need a Page For Each Service You Offer?

  Lyndsay: So what you’re saying is that you would need an individual page for those services, is that right?

  Martin: Yeah, if you want to rank for copyediting or proofreading, then you’re much better going for a tactic of … Only it’s not really a tactic, it’s just common sense. If I’m on a website and I want to buy some proofreading services, ideally I want to click on a menu item that says proofreading, and I want to consume all that content. The other content might not be relevant to me, and … bad user experience.

  Martin: And that’s why we keep saying, if you think about your users first, then SEO will follow, and your rankings will follow. The main reason for this is you can rank for proofreading, but you can also rank for why you need a proofreader, or how much does proofreading cost?

  Martin: Now, if you’ve got a full page for that, just about that specific service, then you’re more likely to be able to include keywords around your main topic. And when we say keywords, and I want everybody to be aware of this, because we live and breathe this every day sometimes I have to cast my mind back to what it was like when we was learning this stuff, when we say keyword, it doesn’t actually mean a single word, it means a topic, it could be a word or a phrase.

  Martin: So, if you’re trying to optimize your webpage or blog post for proofreading services, then that would be a keyword. So, don’t get too caught up in the specifics, but a keyword is not simply a word, it’s kind of a phrase, or it could be a word, or it could be a group of phrases, like how much does a proofreader cost, that’s a single keyword.

  Lyndsay: Okay, so that’s quite interesting, actually, because I think when people think about this, they want to aim for the big keywords don’t they?

  Martin: Yeah.

  Lyndsay: So, say I’m a proofreader, I want to get on the first page of google for proofreader, but actually it might be better if I try and hit how much does a proofreader cost? And, you know, answer those questions. That’s a really interesting way of looking at it, isn’t it?

  Martin: Yeah, definitely, and that’s part of the barrier that people face. It’s the first thing you think, I want to rank for insurance company, I want to rank for writer, do you know what I mean? It’s just … It’s just a big, broad phrase that so many people want to rank for.

  Martin: And when you check online, on these keyword research tools, you’ll see that those are the ones that people search for mostly. But, in fact, when you add up all of the other little keywords that people search for around that general topic, you find that those keywords, when you look at them on a big picture, they all add up to more than the big, , money keyword, the big, powerful keyword that we think, and people don’t know that.

  Lyndsay: Yeah, definitely, and you might find as well that someone searching for proofreader might just want to know what a proofreader is. They might just want to know a definition, whereas if someone’s searching for how much does a proofreader cost, they’re actively looking for a service. So, it’s actually probably more targeted, isn’t it, to do it that way, rather than go for big, broad, you know, keywords, where a lot of your audience might not be applicable. So, that’s really, really interesting.

  Content Marketing and SEO

  Lyndsay: Okay, so, I mean, we’ve briefly touched on it when we said how much does a proofreader cost? I mean, we did a blog post, didn’t we, that was how much does a website cost, and that’s probably one of our most trafficked blog posts. So, I think that goes on to my next question, really, which is content is king. So, if you’re trying to rank, how would you use content in order to do that?

  Martin: Well, like we said, we already know what your main services are, you will know, if your business, what your main services are, but you’ll also get a series of questions about that main topic. And, like I said, if we just wanted to produce one blog post about how much does a website cost, then we’ve got a certain amount of traffic on that. But, if you really break it down, like, for instance, we broke it down, we said in the previous episodes, we said, “Why are we so expensive? Why are we so cheap,” and we’re currently writing one at the minute that says, “How much does it cost to build your own website?”

  Martin: We treat that kind of question as an idea for lots of other questions that we can ask, and that’s why so many people are talking about content marketing these days, because they understand that without going that deep into your, content efforts, you’re going to limit the amount of people that come to your website.

  Martin: And that’s why, if you only have a five page website, and you only have five different services, yes, that’s good, because you can optimize those individual pages, but you’re only going to reach so many people based on five different questions on five different topics. And that’s why people are writing lots of blog content, producing podcasts, and just stretching out that content and making it so that you can rank for hundreds and thousands of keywords, rather than just five or 10.

  Lyndsay: Yeah, that makes complete sense. So, if someone were to think, okay, well, how do I come up with these ideas for content? How would you recommend that someone do that?

  Martin: Well, the first thing, really, is again we come back to user experience. What are the kind of questions people ask you on a regular basis? Likelihood is if you get an email and people say, “What does proofreading actually include, or what do you actually do when I pay you?” Then chances are lots of other people online are searching for it.

  Martin: And if you don’t have a big following at the minute, and you don’t have lots of people asking you questions about your services, you can use online tools, like keyword research tools, for instance. There’s one that we always recommend. It’s quite expensive when you’re starting out, but they do a free trial, and it’s called KWFinder, and if you just search for KWFinder you’re able to throw in a keyword and test it out for free. You can use one try within 24 hours.

  Lyndsay: So, we’ll add that to the show notes.

  Martin: Yeah, KWFinder. There are lots of other ones as well, and some of them are free, and some of them are premium tools like that one. But it’s worth just kind of taking one of your services, like proofreading, or speaking, or coaching, or whatever, and actually throw it into KWFinder, and you’ll find out how many people actually search for that topic. Not only that, you’ll be presented with lots of other ideas for keywords that you could potentially optimize for, like the extended keywords that we’ve been talking about.

  Martin: And I don’t want to get too technical, but if you’ve ever heard of the phrase long tail keywords, then that generally means three or four words, like how much does it cost for a proofreader? Or what is included in proofreading services? Those kind of keywords are the ones that are going to pop up when you type in that kind of big money keyword.

  Lyndsay: Okay, great. So, once we have some ideas, either from the questions that a lot of clients, or potential clients, have asked us, we’ve done some keyword research, so we start writing some blog posts around these topics that people will be pointing to Google. Is there anything then … So, you have your blog post, is there anything then that we can do with the blog post to really optimize that for Google?

  Martin: Yeah, I mean, lots of people say that the only text that you need on a webpage, that’s a blog post, that’s a page, it doesn’t actually make a difference, really, in the eyes of Google, but one of the things people say is you only need 300 words. And we know from experience that there are tools out there that they you only need 300 words and then you can move on to another page.

  Martin: We’ve found the most successful blog posts are the more in depth ones, the ones that really break down the question, or the topic, in mind. And when you do that, you give yourself an opportunity to include more keywords.

  Martin: So, let’s just say you are wanting to optimize your blog post for how much does a proofread cost. May as well stick with this same question, can’t really get it out of my mind at the minute. But if you’re thinking of writing a blog post about that particular aspect, then the best thing that you can do is think about the subcategories of that question.

  Martin: So, really break it down and think, well, if I was to give this blog post sections, like chapters of a book, for instance, then what would those chapters be? And we call them subheadings. So, when you’re reading a blog post you’ll notice that you’ve got your main heading, and you’ve got lots of little subheadings within the post as well.

  Martin: You can take all of these additional keywords and questions that people have been asking about this main topic and use them within the subheadings. That’s a really good thing that you can do.

  Martin: And, although, again, we’re trying to keep it quite basic, if you’re using WordPress or any other content management system, you can actually assign heading tags to these individual subheadings. So, it’s not enough to actually just use them as subheadings, you actually want to tell search engines that they are subheadings, like heading twos, or heading threes, and you want to use them throughout the blog post. So that’s one main thing that you can really do to give yourself the best chances of ranking highly.

  Optimising Posts and Pages

  Lyndsay: Okay, so, to take the example that we’re using, obviously, how much does a proofreader cost, you might have subheadings that say what is the industry standard for proofreading costs, or what are the disadvantages of hiring a really cheap proofreader. You might break it down like that and then assign them heading tags as you suggested.

  Martin: Exactly, yeah.

  Lyndsay: Okay, that makes complete sense.

  Martin: Yeah, so that’s one thing. I mean, obviously with WordPress you’ve got the Yoast SEO plugin, which I’m sure lots of our listeners will be using. So you can obviously assign an overall topic for your title tag. So, you’ve got 50 to 55 characters that you can actually put the main keyword, so we have to spend a little bit of time on this to make sure that you’re including the keywords, it’s not too spammy, it looks like, because that’s what’s going to appear on search engines. When somebody searches for that question they see the title tag, and that is actually looked at quite highly by search engines.

  Martin: So, things like that, the way that you save your images, you know, your filenames, sometimes, if you have taken an image on your iPhone it will come up with all the random numbers, it’s best to include your-

  Lyndsay: Yeah, like, photo 54347.

  Martin: Yeah, exactly, or if you take it on a Samsung you might get SMG 345, and ideally you want to get in the routine of changing those. Funnily enough, we do have a blog post about this, and it goes for pages or posts, but we actually wrote a blog post about 12 months ago which breaks down all of the different things that you can do to optimize your content, and it includes a few of the things that we spoke about as well.

  Lyndsay: Yeah, absolutely, I’ll put in a link to that blog post in the show notes, because, you know, obviously explaining on a podcast where you fill in your title tags or meta descriptions is quite difficult, but on the blog post we make it really clear, and really break it down how to optimize your blog post. So, I will pop the link into that, that’s great.

  Martin: And it’s not just the blog post as well, I mean, the same principles you can apply to your home page, to your service page, to your about page even. So, don’t just think we’re talking about blog posts here, and we’re not saying that you have to focus all of your efforts on writing brand new content. If you apply these same principles to your individual pages, then you’ll be on the right path.

  Is it Worth Paying an SEO company?

  Lyndsay: Absolutely. So, my final question, which is probably one of the most popular questions we get. It’s probably a good keyword, actually, is it worth paying a company to do SEO for me?

  Martin: I get it, yeah, we get a lot of … a lot of people ask this question, and I’m not surprise, because there’s so much information out there you’re not sure who to listen to, what book to read, what video to watch. So, at some point you might just say, you know what? Can I just pay someone to do this for me?

  Martin: But I would tell you to hold off on that as long as possible. Much like the question in episode one, which was should I build my own website? Same principles, really. If you hire an SEO company to do it for you, that’s okay if you have the budget, but you need to know a little bit about what they’re going to be doing, first. So, I would at least learn a little bit about it if you’re going to hire a company.

  Martin: And we actually used to sell SEO services up until recently, and we still do have a few SEO clients, but we don’t actually sell it as a service anymore, which is why we’re open and honest about all of the information and what to do, because we just want to see you guys make a difference before you part with your cash.
  Martin: There are good times to hire an SEO company. For instance, if you have a big budget, and you have lots of competitors, then you can hire an SEO company to go out and build loads and loads of back links to your website, you know, high quality back links. They’ll write guest posts for you. They’ll do loads of stuff. They’ll go out to media influencers and write guest posts and get back links to your website, and that’s all well and good. That costs a lot of money, though.

  Martin: So, there’s like these big companies that do all this for you, but you’re talking a lot. I mean, you’re talking 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 pound a month in some instances, and you don’t necessarily need that at this point if you focus on the basics.

  Lyndsay: Yeah, okay. So, I mean, we see a lot of SEO companies, and I’m sure our listeners have seen a lot of SEO companies as well, that offer a , I don’t know, SEO for 100 pound a month. So, if I had that option, okay, I’ve got a company that offers, you know, 100 pound a month for SEO, or I can spend my time doing, you know, content marketing, and just optimizing my pages myself, which is the better option there? Because 100 pound a month sounds pretty attractive.

  Martin: Yeah, it’s pretty cheap, and that’s exactly the kind of service that you’re going to get, if I’m being honest with you. It’s going to be a minimal. For 100 pound a month … I mean, you have to think, if someone’s getting paid an hourly rate, they might get paid, , 20 pound an hour, 30 pound an hour, and if they’re spending those five hours actually working on your website, what are they actually going to be doing?

  Martin: And let’s not forget that SEO is ongoing. Now, most of the things that we’re talking about in this podcast episode you can do, and you can optimize your website, and you can spend a weekend on it and do it all in one go, just a few of the aspects, you can make a real difference to your rankings.

  Martin: But with an SEO company, you have to pay them for a long time. So that 100 pound that you might pay them for whatever work they’re going to do-

  Lyndsay: That can add up.

  Martin: It can do, yeah, and unless you actually know exactly what they’ve done on your website, it’s very difficult for you to get an idea of whether or not that money’s being well spent. Because we know what it’s like, I mean, you ring a company and you’re like, “I want to cancel my services,” and they say, “Well, this happens if you cancel your services,” and you get into this kind of rot, really, where you’re just not sure what the best situation is.

  Martin: We’ve had clients come to us that say, “I’ve been paying an SEO company for three years and it’s not been working, and every time I speak to them, they say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re just going to … the mobile update’s just come through, we just need to do some more work,'” and then there’s always another reason why you’re not seeing results.

  Martin: Yeah, if you’re paying 100 pound a month and you’re getting results from it, then great, as long as you-

  Lyndsay: That is rare though, isn’t it?

  Martin: As long as you can get a return on your investment, then fantastic. But SEO is a very, very kind of content driven thing, really. So, yeah, if you’re writing lots of content every month, and they’re optimizing that content for you, then fantastic, 100 pound a month is glorious. In fact, I might hire them, please send me the details.

  Martin: But, nine times out of 10, you’re going to get trapped with an SEO company for that amount of money who are doing the bare minimum, but you may find it difficult to get out of that.

  Summary

  Lyndsay: Okay, that’s really interesting. So, I think we’ve covered quite a lot there. Certainly the basics of SEO, and I think it’s a topic that we could talk about for a long time, isn’t it?

  Martin: Exactly, yeah.

  Lyndsay: So, we will be doing a lot more about SEO on the podcast in the future, I’m sure. So, I do hope that you enjoy today’s episode.

  Lyndsay: Just to go back to our free Facebook group that I mentioned before, please do join that group, because as of recording we are doing our free website critiques, where we tell you exactly how you can improve your website. That’s every week, and we look forward to every week don’t we, Martin?

  Martin: We do, I love it.

  Lyndsay: It’s really nice, really, really nice. And you can join that by visiting jammydigital.com/Facebook.

  Lyndsay: Okay, and another thing we would really love you to do is to subscribe to us on iTunes, leave us an honest review. It really helps us reach more people and deliver lots more great content.

  Lyndsay: Okay, so, see you next time on the Make Your Mark Online Podcast.

  

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Ep 3 – SEO Basics for Personal Brands appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Are you a personal brand struggling to build and grow your website?

This is the introductory episode of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast with husband and wife team, Martin & Lyndsay.

In this episode, we’ll be talking about:

• What topics we’ll be covering in future episodes
• Who the show is for (so you know you’re in the right place)
• A little about us and our background
• How you can get your website reviewed for FREE
• How you can find more relevant content

If you want to grow your online presence, drive more visitors to your website and make more sales. SUBSCRIBE and download the first 4 episodes right away.

The Make Your Mark Online Podcast

The Make Your Mark Online Podcast tells you how to create an online presence you can be proud of. We’ll be going through all sorts of juicy topics like conversion rate optimisation (CRO), copywriting for the web, search engine optimisation (SEO) and content marketing.

We’ll be breaking these topics down, making it easy-peasy for non-techies like you to understand and implement in your business straight away. Head on over to episode one of the podcast where we delve into whether you should DIY your website or pay an agency to do it for you.

Meet Your Podcast Hosts

The Make Your Mark Online Podcast is hosted by Martin and Lyndsay, a husband and wife team who have spent the last seven years designing websites through their digital agency, Jammy Digital. You’ll hear lots of laughter, some disagreements and a few interruptions from our unruly cats.

We’re honest and upfront, and won’t shy away from telling you where to save money and where you should invest it. This isn’t about us getting you to spend thousands on a website, in fact, often it can be quite the opposite!

How To Get In Touch With Us

Most of all, we want to make this podcast as actionable as possible, so you can start implementing exciting new things that will grow your business. If there’s a particular topic you want us to cover or you have any questions then don’t be weird! Just drop us an email at hello@jammydigital.com

Feel free to also check out our resources on our blog and join our FREE Facebook group by visiting jammydigital.com/facebook

As of recording this episode, we’re offering free website critiques in the group, where we tell you EXACTLY how to improve your website. So join a thriving community and put your website forward.

Bye for now!

Episode Transcript Below

Martin: Hey, guys. Welcome to Episode 0, or the intro for the Make Your Mark Online Podcast.

Lyndsay: So we’re gonna be covering a lot in this podcast, aren’t we?

Martin: Yes.

What Will We Cover in Our Podcast?

Lyndsay: And we’re really excited to actually start it. We’re going to be talking about personal brand website design. We’re gonna be talking about search engine optimization, copywriting, content marketing, pretty much anything that will help build your online presence as a personal brand.

About Jammy Digital

Martin: Yes. And we’ve been building websites for years. We’ve got the agency, Jammy Digital, and we’ve just realized that there’s so many business owners out there who are making the same mistakes with the website. Maybe they want to generate more traffic, maybe they want to convert their customers to be able to hire them. Whether they’re coaches, they’re speakers, they’re authors, ultimately, we want take all of our knowledge from all of our years of helping business owners like you, and tell you what to do with your website to make it more successful.

Lyndsay: Exactly, yes. I mean, we’ve essentially had years of practice, haven’t we?
At seeing what works, and what doesn’t work. And so we’re bottling all that information up into this podcast.

Martin: This is our opportunity to actually just teach more.

Lyndsay: Exactly, yes. Which we really love to do.

Join Our FREE Facebook Group

Martin: And another thing before we let you get your teeth into the content is we wanted to invite you to our free Facebook group. This is at jammydigital.com/facebook

Martin: Now this is our Facebook group where we answer sort of questions, and we give tips, and lots of tools away. But we’re also doing free website critiques at the minute. Now I’m not sure how long we’re going be doing it for, but if you head over to jammydigital.com/facebook every Wednesday we are reviewing websites completely 100% free. So we spend around an hour on a Skype call, and we actually review up to five or six websites an hour, don’t we?

Lyndsay: Yes. We really love it, don’t we?

Martin: Yes.

Lyndsay: Every week, we get so excited for Wednesday afternoons-

Martin: Exactly.

Lyndsay: … because then we can start reviewing some websites, and giving people pointers of how they can improve.

Martin: Definitely.

Lyndsay: And it’s great to see, actually, of the time that people have made these changes, and start seeing improvements. And that’s really nice to see-

Martin: Exactly.

Lyndsay: … isn’t it?

Martin: And we’d love to see your website make those improvements as well. And one last thing we’d be really, really grateful for is if you subscribe to our iTunes podcast, and maybe leave us a review? We would love to hear what you think of the podcast, and it will help us reach more of our ideal listeners like you.

Martin: So I’ll see you in Episode 1.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post EP 0 – Introduction to the Make Your Mark Online Podcast appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Your website might fail.

All of the time and effort you put into creating your website might not lead to a successful business.

It happens all the time and like it or not; nobody is guaranteed success.

Some people invest £10,000 in a new website, and some people pay less than £100.

It doesn’t matter. It could still fail.

Over the years, we’ve noticed that there six key reasons your website isn’t working.

These things will stop you from getting traction and cause your website to become ineffective.

I want you to avoid failure as much as possible, which is why I wrote this article.

My hope is that you fix these issues before it’s too late.

1. Nobody wants or needs your product

Let’s get this one out of the way first.

Your website will NOT make up for a bad product. Not even a big fancy site with all the bells and whistles.

If your product or service is bad or simply not relevant. Your website (and business) is likely to fail.

I know it sounds harsh, and it is, but it’s vital that you have a product you can actually sell. Otherwise, what’s the point?

What can you do about it?

Be honest and ask yourself, do people want or need the product or service that you sell? Or was it just an idea that came to you, which you ran with.

If it’s the latter, I’d strongly recommend that you do some research to see if there’s a market for it.

I read a fantastic book on this very topic. It’s called Will It Fly by Pat Flynn. It will allow you to test out your idea to see if there’s a need or desire for it.

If it turns out there is a market for your product/services then great, however, if it turns out your product isn’t as relevant as you’d hoped, then see how you can develop the product and make it more commercial.

This isn’t a time for feeling sorry for yourself; you have to adapt or risk failure.

2. Your website is ugly

If your website looks like it was designed by a drunk 4-year-old, it’s probably NOT going make you rich.

Your visitors care about design and you should too. It makes sense. If you have a nice clean website, people will generally stick around for longer and potentially do business with you.

On the other hand, a bad looking website will turn people away and impact the number of customers you get.

This is why it’s so important to have an attractive website.

Here are a few things I see from time-to-time that might make your visitors feel icky;

Bad choice of colours – Luminous green is always a bad choice
Hard to read font choice – Fancy does not mean better
Stretched or distorted images – Image quality is so important

What can you do about it?

Your website doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It just has to be clean and simple.

Generally speaking, if you have paid a web designer I would hope that the site looks pretty good. Your chances will certainly be better than if you do it yourself. If you’re in any doubt whatsoever, get some honest feedback by sharing your website in our free Facebook group and title it “honest feedback needed”.

The biggest problem when business owners build their own website is they make it far too complicated. Too many features and too much clutter.

The best advice I can give you is to find a low-cost template and use that as the framework for your website.

You can install WordPress templates for around £50 and as long as you don’t change too much, it’s going to look pretty good.

Bad design will definitely impact on the success of your website so please take some pride in it.

3. You’re making your visitor think too much

A common problem I see when reviewing websites is a lack of clear, concise messaging. Everything is far too complicated and it’s just confusing for your visitor.

Imagine if you were walking down a street and none of the shops had signs up. Instead, they all had vague statements like:

“Helping you to prosper”
“Making you feel in control”
“Communications through solutions”

It would be pretty confusing trying to work out what anyone does. So why the hell do we do this we our websites?

Everywhere I look online, business owners are trying to be clever by using these random phrases. I’ve never really understood why because it just confuses people. They don’t help anyone and in most cases they’ll turn people away.

This also goes for the rest of your website text too, there seems to be too much industry jargon and not enough simple language.

What can you do about it?

Keep it simple. Whenever you write anything for your website ask yourself…

1. Would this be easy for ANYONE to understand?
2. Do I make it clear exactly what we do?

If the answer is no to any of these then you will want to revisit it.

Around two years ago, I read a book by Ann Handley call Everybody Writes and it helped me understand that writing is a lot easier than we think. I would suggest anyone struggling with getting started to check out that book too.

It’s also worth checking out this post, where I talk about how to get across what it is you do in one sentence, with some examples too.

4. You’re ignoring SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is far from dead. As long as people are still using sites like Google to browse online, SEO will be important.

I know it might seem complicated but SEO is part and parcel of running an online business. If you have not spent the time understanding even the basics of SEO then you’re probably missing out on a lot of traffic.

The truth is, there are lots of people out there searching the internet for your products and services and by burying your head in the sand, you’re simply missing out.

What can you do about it?

SEO doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s like anything else, learning a little bit and taking action will allow you to improve over time.

We’ve written lots of blog posts about SEO that can help you get started for free. We avoid jargon as much as possible and include lots of examples and images to make things easier to understand.

Here are a few to help you on your way.

SEO for Blog Posts
SEO Jargon
Why you’re not ranking in Google

You could also take an online SEO course, look on sites like Udemy or Lynda, you could even pay for a website critique and we’ll tell you exactly what to do with your website to improve your chances of ranking higher in search results.

There are so many ways you can learn about SEO if you just focus on it.

Even if you hire a company to help with SEO, I would still recommend that you learn the basics first so you can inspect the work that the company have been doing.

5. Your blogging efforts are poor

If you are not adding new, quality content to your website on a regular basis, you’re going to get left behind.

Blogging can help in so many ways:

• It helps educate your visitors
• It builds trust
• It generates more traffic
• It allows you to get more customers

These days your visitors expect information fast, they want to visit your websites and get answers to questions before they buy. They don’t want to wait to speak to you on the phone or via email, they want a self-service website where they can inspect you on their terms.

What can you do about it?

At the very least you can write 2 blog posts or new pages per month and focus on helping your audience.

• Think about the questions that your customers ask you on a daily basis. Write an article to answer those questions.
• Write articles that educate your audience and empower them to achieve more. For me it might be “The Ultimate SEO Checklist for your Blog Posts”
• Write articles about your internal process. What is it like to work with you. For example, we wrote an article on “how we build your website from start to finish”

Write down a list of all the blog posts you can think of and come up with a content calendar so you can plan, write and promote your content over the coming months.

6. Your visitors don’t trust you

If you want more customers, your website needs to feel trustworthy.

With all the dodgy websites out there, it’s no surprise people are cautious about buying from websites they’ve never heard of.

This is why you need to build up a level of trust.

What can you do about it

There are many ways to show your visitors that your website is trustworthy, here are just a few:

• Show images and videos of you and your team
• Show genuine case studies and testimonials
• Educate your readers so they become more informed

More than anything, it’s about being authentic and showing who you are and what you stand for. Take this article for example. I wrote this because I wanted my readers to be aware of the potential dangers of an ineffective website. I want my customers to understand that I am an honest person and that they are not guaranteed success. It takes hard work.

Summary

Please understand that your shiny new website is not a golden ticket to success. It takes hard work and constant improvement. Your website is simply a vehicle that can help you get there BUT you are the driver.

I get that this article might come across as one big rant, but as I said at the beginning, I want you to be successful. I don’t want you staring at your analytics and your bank account in 6 months time and wondering why nothing is happening.

Over to you

Be honest, do you think you’ve suffered from any of these in the past? I certainly have. Please tell me your story in the comments below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Why Your Website Might Fail appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

But when you’re not pulling in enough enquiries or sales, it might be time to examine what’s going wrong.

The only thing is, it’s often difficult for you to identify any issues with your site, especially if you’ve designed it yourself, and haven’t had a professional to help.

When you’re building a website yourself, you tend to focus on one thing…how it looks.

This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s only ONE of the MANY factors that go into a successful website. And if you’re not careful, you could be missing out on business.

Over the years, we’ve noticed that many business owners make the same mistakes with their websites. Consequently, they see limited results.

This is why we launched our “website critique” service. This is where we review your website and send you a 30-minute video with our advice and feedback so you can make improvements.

Over the past 12 months since starting this service, our clients have experienced dramatic growth as a result of our feedback.

But how do you know if YOU will benefit from a website critique? Below, I’ve listed the six main reasons you might need some honest feedback about your website.

1. You need some honest feedback on the design

The way your website looks is SO important, and it can make the difference between generating sales and hearing crickets. If you have an attractive, easy-to-use website, then more people will stick around and potentially do business with you.

However, if your website looks dated and it’s difficult to use, it WILL affect your bottom line. It’s a real shame because you might have spent time creating a useful website, but an unattractive or un-user-friendly design will put people off.

How will a website critique help?

We’ll give you some honest feedback about the design of your website. From our years of experience, we understand what makes a good website and what doesn’t.

In a website critique, we will tell you what we think about your site and what we would change. It might be as simple as changing a few colours or fonts, or we might suggest changing the layout and style to make it more user-friendly.

2. You’re not ranking well on Google, and you don’t know why

Every day, people are using search engines to find products and services like yours, and people trust Google to deliver the best results. This is why it’s so important that you are found online.

If you’re not ranking on the first page of search results for relevant key phrases, you’re likely missing out on visitors and sales.

For most businesses, organic search is the number one source of traffic, so it’s understandable why so many people need help increasing their rankings.

How will a website critique help?

We will analyse your website from a search engine perspective and give you specific changes that you can make to improve your search engine rankings.

We’ll look through your website and tell you if you’re making any mistakes and how to correct them.

We’ll also run a full technical audit to see if there are any underlying issues that are preventing you from being found online.

3. You’re not converting visitors into leads

Your website is not just an online business card, it has a job to do. It should be delivering a steady flow of new enquires all the time. The type of lead or enquiry depends on your business but here are a few examples:

• Contact form entries
• Phone calls
• Free online consultations
• Email subscribers

Whatever it is you want your visitors to do, your website needs to encourage your users to take some kind of action.

Far too often we don’t give our users clear direction. We leave them to wander around our website in the hopes that they will get in touch, and they rarely do.

How will a website critique help?

We’ll review your website fully and assess how you can increase your lead generation. There could be a problem with the design and layout of your website, or there could be an issue with the copy you’re using. We’ll give you some tips to improve your leads and enquiries.

4. You’re not making enough sales

You could have the best-looking website in the world, but if nobody is buying from you what’s the point? There’s nothing worse than spending time and money building a new website only to have it generate no sales.

The old adage “build it and they will come” is simply not true when it comes to your website. There is so much competition out there you have to be extremely focused on making your products and service stand out from the crowd.

For someone to feel confident buying from you, you need to build up a certain amount of trust. Your prospects want to feel like they’re making the right decision and it’s your job to make them feel safe when handing over their cash.

How will a website critique help?

There are a few key things you can do on your website to build trust, that you might not already be doing. We’ll review your website and identify any opportunities to improve this and increase sales.

We’ll also take a look at you sales pages and product pages to see if you’re including all the right information and addressing your visitors objections.

Another reason people might not buy from you is because they have certain questions that you might not answer on your website. We’ll help you come up with a content plan so your visitors learn more about your products and services, which should lead to more customers.

5. Users are leaving your website quickly

You only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention when they visit your website. Fail to do this, and they’ll lose interest and click the back button. You probably do this when browsing online too.

There are many reasons someone might leave your site quickly, including a lack of clear direction, inability to communicate what it is you do, messy design, etc.

All of this will impact user experience and cause your visitor to be frustrated and leave quickly.

How will a website critique help?

We can advise you how to captivate your audience before they leave your site. There are certain design principles you can do to engage your visitors and keep them around for longer.

We’ll take a look at your website and tell you what you can do to help your users consume more of your content.

6. Your traffic numbers are low

If your website isn’t getting a lot of traffic, it can be really frustrating. You’ve spent time creating a website, and nobody is visiting it. The more relevant visitors you have, the more potential buyers you have.

It’s also worth mentioning that without a consistent flow of visitors, you won’t be able to get a good understanding of how people are using your website, what you can improve and what you may need to get rid of.

Having the data will allow you to make certain adjustments to your website that will increase sales.

How will a website critique help?

There are many things you can do to start generating more website traffic, and I’m not talking about paying for advertising.

We’ll help you come up with a strategy so you can start reaching more people. This might mean making your website more search engine friendly, or we can spend some time looking at your content to see if it’s good enough to attract more visitors.

Summary

If you’re concerned about your website and think it might not be performing well enough, let us know. We can tell you if we think a website critique is the right way to go.

If you want to book your website critique now, then click the button below and get started. We’ll send you your 30-minute video in the next seven days.

Book a Website Critique

Over to you

Have you suffered from any of these website problems before, how did you overcome them? I’d be interested to know in the comments below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post 6 warning signs you need a website critique appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

It’s a decision that we didn’t take lightly but one that we are happy with.

SEO has been a huge part of our business, and it’s going to be an interesting transition going forward.

Did we fall out of love with SEO? Did we have a bad experience? The answer to both questions is NO.

We love helping our clients get incredible results (who wouldn’t) this is why it took us a long time to make this decision. Stopping something you enjoy doing, and are good at, is difficult for anyone.

Even if you’re doing it for the right reasons.

1. We love building websites

We want to focus all our efforts on building the best websites possible.

I actually started my journey as a web designer 5 years ago. I only added SEO to the mix later on once I learned as much as I could about it.

Learning SEO and getting great results for our clients has helped us build better websites. They tend to rank better, they’re more user-friendly, and we can advise our clients what they could do to improve SEO.

My real passion has always been in building websites. Taking an idea or basic sketch and turning into a reality is what excites me. Creating a website from nothing and see it make money for a client is the best feeling in the world, and we want to spend more time doing this.

Another part of what we love about building websites is seeing the finished product. It’s true; a website is never truly “finished” but there is a point where we launch a new website and hand over the reigns to our clients.

At that point I feel a sense of accomplishment.

However, the very nature of SEO means, it’s never-ending. It’s a continuous service that happens month after month and it never really feels complete. Although this is very profitable, I still miss that sense of completion that I get from my web design projects.

2. We didn’t want to hold anything back

We’ve always tried to be as giving as possible when it comes to our knowledge. SEO is a topic I personally love to talk about and could do so until I was blue in the face.

However, when you offer a service like SEO, there’s always a feeling that I should be saving some of the information for my paying clients. Surely the REALLY valuable stuff should be given to paying clients only…right?

NO!

This is another reason we gave it up. We didn’t want anything to be held back when speaking to clients and prospects.

Our goal is to be 100% transparent with our audience, and now we’ve taken money out of the equation, we get to spread our message without any filter.

And I feel really excited about it.

3. We want YOU to learn SEO rather than pay for it

SEO is easier than you think.

Over the past 4 years since I’ve been offering SEO, I’ve realised that Google are making it easier for small businesses to have an impact on the web.

SEO is easier to understand and less technical than ever before.

There are thousands of SEO blogs out there giving free advice on how to optimise your website for search engines. Not to mention all the books, video courses and podcasts that offer guidance too.

Content management systems like WordPress, Weebly and Shopify allow you to optimise your own website easily and start seeing results within weeks.

It’s far more cost-effective for you to learn and understand the basics and try your hand at at it first.

Even if you decide to hire an SEO agency later on, you’ll be able to understand the work that has been carried out. You’ll have a better grasp of what and why things have been done and save yourself some time and money in the process.

4. We get to spend more time helping our clients

We’re developing a new online training centre for our clients where we’ll put together a series of videos and downloads that will help them understand SEO better.

When you hire us to build your website, you’ll have the opportunity to join the training centre and learn everything you need to know to drive more organic traffic to your website.

We’ll teach you everything we’ve learned over the years, and you can implement it yourself without the need for an SEO company.

Now that we’ve stopped providing SEO services, it means we have more time to invest in training.

5. We are still offering SEO consulting

Although we are not taking on new SEO projects, we are not going anywhere, and we can still help you with your SEO strategy.

We offer hourly 1-2-1 coaching via Skype, and we also offer a website critique service where we’ll review your website and send you a video with our feedback.

These services allow us to help more people for a one-time fee. No contracts, no monthly fees, just 100% help and advice tailored around your needs.

What happens now

So what does this mean, is the last time I’m going to talk write about SEO?

Nope.

I’m planning on writing a lot more SEO content for my audience; I want to start recording more videos and creating ebooks too. I just want to give away my knowledge, rather than save it for my SEO clients.

Summary

It’s never easy cutting a service from your business. Especially one that’s been very profitable over the years. I made this decision even though it went against my business instincts. I went with my heart instead. And I’m happy that I did.

If you want to take advantage of our website critique service, hit the button below. We’ll send you a 30-minute website critique video telling you how to improve your SEO.

Book A Website Critique

Over to you

Have you ever made a decision that didn’t make sense on paper? Maybe like me, you chose to go with your heart rather than your head. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Why we’ve stopped selling SEO appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

If you’ve ever said that to yourself, you’re not alone.

For most people, search engines drive a majority of the traffic to our websites. And with Google being the number one website on the internet, it’s no surprise we all obsess over our rankings.

This is why I wrote this post. I wanted to give you a few tips on how to track your keyword rankings along with a few tools to help you get started.

What do you want to rank for?

Before we start looking at tools it’s important you know what your goals are.

When I hear people saying “I want to rank on the first page of Google” my reply is always…

“For what?”

What I mean by this is, what search terms do you want to rank for?

It’s all well and good having the tools but you need to make sure you’d doing it the right way and not wasting your time.

Different Types of Keywords

There are a few different kinds of keywords and it’s best that you know the difference so you can get a more accurate picture of where you rank.

Branded keywords

Branded keywords are words and phrases that are based around your business such as:

• Your business name
• Your name
• The name of your own physical products
• The name of your online course
• The name of your membership community
• The name of your event

You should keep a close eye on your branded keywords and where you rank in search engines. You might not think it’s important but it really is. If you’re NOT ranking highly when someone types in the name of your business then it’s a sign that something could be wrong. There might be a technical reason you’re not appearing highly which is why it’s important to track your branded keywords.

This can happen a lot with a brand new website as they usually take time to get listed but if your website has been live for a few months and you still aren’t showing up for your branded keywords, there could be a problem.

Service-based keywords

Service-based keywords are the most sought after. These are words and phrases that your ideal customer might search for online such as:

• Web design companies
• Car finance deals
• Cheap flights
• Vegan recipes
• Driving instructor

These types of keywords are often the most difficult to rank for, as you’re competing with everyone who has a website in your particular industry.

For most small business owners, it’s simply not realistic to think you can rank on the first page of Google for these types of keywords without a huge budget.

It’s still a good thing however, to keep track of these phrases, but don’t be disheartened when your brand new travel blog isn’t appearing above Ryanair in Google for the keyword “cheap flights”.

Product-based keywords

If you sell products on your website, the likelihood is you won’t rank for the industry you’re in. Say for example, you sell coats, unless you’re ASOS or Debenhams, the likelihood of you coming close to page one for the word ‘coats’ without a huge budget is slim!

What you need to do is rank for your individual products. So you’d have more chance of ranking on Google for these search terms, instead:

This is actually good news, because, as research suggests, users aren’t just typing in the word coats, they’re more specific with what they need.

So, if you do sell physical products on your website then you’ll want to track where your pages are ranking for relevant keywords.

Location-specific keywords

If your business services customers in a specific location then you’ll want to track “location specific keywords” such as:

• Locksmith Manchester
• Hotels in York
• Restaurants in Edinburgh
• Funeral directors Liverpool

These types of keywords are extremely valuable to local businesses and are often the number one source of traffic.

Think about the service you offer and track [your keywords] plus [your location].

Long-tail keywords

Another option when choosing certain keywords to track is to think about any longer, more specific phrases someone might type into Google.

What would your ideal customer type into the search field that you could be ranking for?

• Best red coat for winter
• Cheap WordPress web designers
• Best locksmith in Manchester UK

As you would expect, these types of keywords are less popular when searched for individually but long tails keywords make up a majority of the overall searches on Google. i.e More people type in specific keywords (3 words or longer) rather broad (1-2 word) searches.

This is why it’s a good idea to track long-tail keywords.

Ways to check your website rankings

Now that you have a better idea of which keywords to target, you’ll need to find out where you are ranking on search engines.

I’ve put together a list of 5 different ways you can track your keyword rankings online.

1. Manually – Free (Not recommended)

The most common way for you to check your rankings is to head over to Google and type in your keyword and check the first few pages to see if you can find your website.

However, this is NOT the best solution. Searching from your own computer will show inaccurate results. Your browser will remember the websites you’ve been on before and show a different set of results to what your potential customer might see.

It’s also very time consuming, if you have 10 keywords you want to check and you have to search manually every time, it’s going to take you far too long.

2. The Hoth Rankings Checker (Free)

You can check your rankings The Hoth’s website for free. It will give you the top 100 rankings for your website.

The Hoth Rankings Checker is free to use. You just have to submit your email address and name. You’ll probably receive emails but they explain that you can unsubscribe anytime.

Check out The Hoth

3. Chrome Extension Fat Rank – 100% FREE

I’ve been using this chrome extension for about 2 years and it’s a really cool little tool.

Fatrank is a free rank tracker by Fatjoe. It works a little differently from other tools, but it’s nice to have around when checking rankings quickly.

Once you’ve installed the extension, you can click the icon on the toolbar at the top.

You then type in a keyword and hit “check”

It will show you where you’re ranked as long as you’re ranked within 100 listings (first 10 pages of Google)

It seems pretty accurate and reliable and I’d recommend you install it.

Check out FATRANK

4. Serpfox – From Free – $10 per month for a basic account

Serpfox is my go-to ranking tool. It’s clean, simple and is easy to use.

One of the features that I really like about this tool is that you can see a graph that goes up and down based on your rankings for the day. You can look back to see how your website has performed over a set period of time.

It’s really quick too. Once you add your website URL and keywords to the dashboard, you’ll see your rankings come through within seconds.

You can create a free account and add up to 10 keywords straight away. If you need more than 10, you can upgrade to the $10 per month plan and track up to 100 keywords.

Check Out Serpfox to create a free account

5. SEMRush – From FREE – $99 per month for a basic account.

SEMRush is an industry leader when it comes to SEO software. Although it’s mainly used for competitor analysis and keyword research, I still wanted to include it in the list, and for good reason.

It comes with a specific feature that allows you to discover hidden keywords that you didn’t even know you were ranking for. How cool is that?

You can input your website URL and SEMRush will automatically tell you which keywords are ranking on the first 10 pages of Google.

As you can see in the image below, they’ll show a list of keywords that have more than 20 monthly searches that ALSO rank within the first 10 pages.

You can obviously enter and track your own keywords but this feature makes it different from most of the other tools on the market and it’s the main reason I’m happy to pay the higher monthly fee.

You can test out this tool for free and get a limited list of keywords.

Check out SEMrush here

Over to you

There you have it, 5 ways to check your website rankings and what type of keywords to look for. Now that you have some tips you’ll be able to keep track of your rankings easier. I didn’t want to bombard you with tools but at least now you have some tips to keep you on the right path. And if you’re interested in blogging for SEO, check out these best blogging tools you can use in your business, which include plenty of SEO tools too.

One of the best ways to increase your rankings is by increasing backlinks to your website. And one of the most unique ways of doing this is through appearing on podcasts (when the podcaster links back to you). If you want to learn more about how to do this, check out this article on how to get on a podcast as a guest.

And if you want to learn more about SEO, then check out our SEO Starter Pack. It’s aimed at non-techie business owners, and gives you everything you need to get better search engine rankings.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post 5 FREE ways to check keyword rankings in Google appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

And I don’t blame you. Getting a new website is expensive.

After all, you might be pretty IT savvy. How hard can it possibly be?

I just want to make one thing clear.

Creating a good website is NOT about technical skills.

It’s about much more.

There are many experienced IT companies out there that have terrible websites. IT skills alone won’t deliver a profitable website.

So if you’re thinking about creating your own website, please take a few minutes to read this post. It could be the most important article you’ll read all year.

Drag and drop web design

For those who have limited technical skills, it may be tempting to design your website using drag-and-drop software via companies like WIX, Weebly or Squarespace.

These companies would have you believe that you can knock up a quick website within a day, sit back and let the money roll in.

It might seem easy enough to get started but you’ll quickly realise that there is a LOT more to it. Especially if you want to add or change anything which is outside of their restrictive templates.

Even if you do spend a few weeks or months getting it to look exactly as you want, chances are the final design is not what you’d get from an experienced web designer.

This is why I wrote this article. I wanted you to be fully aware of the complications before you waste time and money trying to build your own website.

Here are the 7 main reasons why you should avoid building your own website without any help and support.

1. Design limitations

Design is not something you can simply pick up in an afternoon. You can’t learn how to design a website without years of experience.

• It’s about how it looks
• It’s about how it makes people feel
• It’s about how it makes people act
• It’s about user experience
• It’s about the character of your business
• It’s about your message to the world

Above all else, website design is about building TRUST.

Without a solid understanding of design, you’ll almost certainly get it wrong. Your competitors on the other hand, might choose to hire a professional web designer and avoid any mistakes.

If you feel like your design skills are limited, then it’s best to stick within the confines of a theme or template. Most people go ahead and try to change a lot about the theme, but this is where you can look amateur.

And if you can, get feedback on your website from a professional website designer, even if that means paying for something like a website critique.

And if all that scares you, then hire somebody to help. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and get something that looks professional.

2. Lack of SEO knowledge

SEO or search engine optimisation is an ever-changing landscape. Search engines change their rules all the time and what worked last month might not work this month.

I’ve been helping clients with SEO for years and I’m still constantly listening, watching and testing to see what’s changed with Google and the other search engines.

I need to have my ear to the ground to be able to keep up to date and build search engine friendly websites. Not only that, if you build your own website, you’re going to have to have an understanding of:

• 301 redirects
• Backlinks
• 404 error pages
• Schema markup
• DA and PA
• Anchor Text

If you don’t feel comfortable with SEO, you could be making some critical mistakes with your website. Mistakes that could cost you 100’s or 1000’s of monthly visitors to your website. We at least recommend you get to know the basics of SEO if you’re designing your own website, such as investing in our SEO Starter Pack.

3. You are NOT your customer

Nobody knows your customers better than you. You live and breathe your business every day and it’s fair to say you know your stuff. We like to think we’re exactly the same.

However, when you’re so involved with running the business, it’s sometimes difficult to see things from your customers’ perspective. It’s difficult to imagine what it might look like seeing your website for the first time by a prospect. This is known as “the curse of knowledge”.

That’s where we can help. We run a membership community where we help and support people building their own websites (and our own plugin page templates to help!) We give regular feedback to our members on their websites. Here are just a few of the common errors we see on websites, just within the first third of your homepage!

• No prominent contact details
• No clear call to action
• No statement explaining succinctly what it is you do

4. You might need help along the way

Like anything technical, building a website is not easy and there will be hurdles along the way. You might be able to pull something basic together with some tutorials and the odd YouTube video, but what happens if something goes wrong?

How will you be able to fix it?

You could try to figure it out yourself by digging through lots of forums and using trial and error, but this could take days. You could hire a techie and pay for a 1hr consultation but this can cost hundreds of pounds.

It’s worth either using a web designer or joining our membership where you get help and support along the way.

We’ve spent years educating ourselves on the technicalities of designing websites and have come across plenty of problems and solutions over that time.

There’s no need for you to do the same.

5. You won’t have the right tools for the job

Designing websites is a specialist skill. Like any creative skill, it requires a number of tools to ensure the job is done correctly.

Here is a list of tools we use to build highly successful websites;

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• WordPress
• FTP
• Premium Plugins
• Technical Audit Tools
• Rank Tracking Software
• Competitor analysis software
• Email Marketing tools
• Landing page software
• Cross Browser Software

Most of these tools are expensive but they are necessary. Especially if I want to create high impact websites for my clients that perform well in search engines.

If you don’t have these tools and/or know how to use them, then you might not get the result you’re hoping for.

It took me a good few years to learn how to use these tools and even longer to use them effectively.

Hiring a web designer or joining our membership will help. A web designer will already have such tools and in our membership, we give you access to tools and templates which make your life so much easier.

6. It will take you much longer than it needs to

Learning to build a website from scratch can take a long time, especially if you aren’t very technical. Even if you’re using drag and drop tools you may need to do a lot of tweaking to get it right. Not to mention all the image editing and resizing to make it look good and load quickly.

As you know, time IS money and whilst you’re learning how to build a website, you’re not managing or marketing the business.

In our membership, it takes our members around 2-3 weeks to build their website and that is because they have our support. A web designer will probably take longer but your time isn’t taken up with building the site yourself.

7. Your competitors

Even if you do have the time to create your own website, chances are your competitors’ websites will look superior. I’m not trying to be mean, but if they have paid for a professional website to be designed and you haven’t, the likelihood is that theirs will work better.

Many businesses understand the importance of quality, which is why they choose to pay a web design company instead of doing it themselves.

If you are trying to stand out then you’ll want a high-quality website then looks better than your competition.

When you should build your website yourself?

Now it’s not all doom and gloom. Not every business owner should go to a website design agency or freelancer to build their website. Some can and should build it themselves. These are business owners who are just starting out, or who aren’t clear on their audience, products or services just yet.

Also, remember, it doesn’t have to cost thousands for a new website. You can get a website at £1000 or even £500.

For those who are wanting to learn and don’t want to spend thousands on a website, our membership is a great option.

And for those who do have the funds, we recommend using a good web designer to help you.

My biggest frustration

This may appear like a shamelessly unbiased blog post. And it is! But the reason I’m writing it is that I’ve had client after client tell me their frustrations when trying to build their own website completely on their own with zero support.

Believe me, at some point you’re going to have to pay a professional (even if it’s just a small amount) if you want your website to be a success and not a time-suck!

Over to you?

Remember, the next step once your website is live (whether you build it yourself or get someone else to do it) is to drive traffic to that website! And you can do this through something like our SEO content writing service.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post 7 reasons you SHOULDN’T design your own website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

It takes a long time to draft, re-write, edit, create images and then publish it.

And after all of that, you have to think about SEO too?

It’s enough to make you want to cry.

We’d like to think that producing great content is enough, but in reality, if you want to get found online, SEO is essential.

But with all the advice out there, how do you begin to know where to start?

This is why I created this checklist. I wanted you to have a go-to resource that you could use over and over again.

After all, if you’ve spent so long writing a great blog post, you want to make sure you have as many readers as possible.

1. Keyword research for your blog post

Keyword research is used to gather a list of common words and phrases that people type into search engines and it’s still an important part of SEO. Understanding the popularity of certain words and phrases is an excellent way to reach more people.

It’s also a good idea to use a keyword research tool to validate your ideas for future articles.

Ideally, you would do your research before you begin writing, that way you can plan the structure of your piece with keywords in mind.

However, even if you’ve already written your post, you may want to go back and confirm that you’ve at least considered the best keywords. You might have missed some key opportunities.

How to do keyword research so you know what keywords to target.

Keyword research tools allow you to search for words and phrases and tell you the average number of monthly searches.

You can use a number of online tools for this and most of them come with a free trial of some kind. Here are a few for you to try out.

KWFinder
SEO Book
Serps
Wordstream
Keyword.io

Here’s an example of what KWFinder looks like when using their keyword tool. You can read this very helpful review of KWFinder right here.

Basic keyword research tips

• Write down a few words and phrases related to your blog post
• Use one of the tools above to gather a list of relevant keywords & keep them to one side
• Put them in order of most relevant to your article
• Take note of the most popular keywords

2. Choosing a blog post title for first page rankings

What is the name or title of your blog post? This is usually the first thing people will see when they visit your post for the first time.

The name you choose will also be the main heading for the post which makes it very important for search engines. For instance, my main heading at the top of this page is “SEO checklist to optimise your blog posts” This is also what will appear when you share your content on social media.

Search engines will take note of the keywords you use in your main heading and use it to rank your blog post. This is why it’s important you take your time with it.

It’s tempting to try to be funny or clever with your heading but I encourage you to tread carefully. I could have chosen something like “10 steps to search engine success” or “10 secrets to get more eyeballs on your blog” but the reality is, that kind of title doesn’t work as well as you think.

“Buzzfeed” type blog titles are only good for one thing: getting low-value traffic from content junkies.

You really don’t want your blog post being treated this way. They might get a couple more shares but you’re missing out on lots of organic search traffic. You also want to position your article as a valuable resource for your target market.

Blog post title tips

• Include your main keyword
• Use sentence form e.g. SEO Checklist to optimise your blog posts
• Try to keep it short. I usually aim for less than 60 characters in length
• Avoid keyword stuffing

3. Optimise your blog post URLs for better SEO

Not to be confused with your domain, URLs are the unique pages on your website. For example, the URL for this page is jammydigital.com/seo-checklist-blog-post. URLs are an extremely important part of SEO. Search engines take note of the URLs you have chosen for your blog posts and will rank you accordingly.

URLs can also be called a page “slug” and depending on which content management system you’re using you should be able to change them easily. Below I’ve shown an example of how it looks in WordPress.

How to choose the best URL or slug for your blog post?

• Try to keep it as short as possible e.g. /seo-checklist-blog-post
• Include your target keyword
• Avoid using any strange characters (%&$£%**&)
• Use hyphens to separate words (not underscores)
• Don’t use stop words such as AND,A,TO,IN,AN
• Avoid using additional elements such as .html or .php

You don’t want an extremely long and messy URL such as jammydigital.com/an-seo-checklist-for-optimising-your-blog-post-for-better-google-rankings.

An extremely long URL doesn’t look very appealing to your users and less people will click through to your website and share it on social media.

4. Structuring your headings and subheadings (H1-H6) for better rankings

The headings you use within your blog posts will help decide what keywords you rank for.

Search engines want you to use heading tags to break up your content, making it easy for their robots to understand.

Headings also have the added benefit of breaking up your content, making it easy for your readers to consume.

Your headings and subheadings should be used in a specific order as shown below. I often see people use H1-H6 tags randomly. They use the different H tags to style their article rather than use them in the correct order.

How to use headings for SEO

Heading 1 (H1) is the main heading on your page (this is usually the blog post title)
Heading 2 (H2) is used for your subheadings and is this is usually the most commonly used headings on a page
Heading 3 (H3) is used for subheadings within your sub headings
Heading 4 (H4) is used for a subheading within your H3
Heading 5 (H5) is used for a subheading within your H4
Heading 6 (H6) is used for a subheading within your H5

Here’s an example of how you use them correctly as a blog post.

Top tips for headings and subheadings

• Outline the main sub-sections of your blog post
• Try to include your keywords where possible
• Try to use sentence form rather than one word (This is harder than you think)
• Only use one H1 Tag
• Don’t forget about H3 to H6

5. Optimising your content so it ranks highly in search results

These days, high quality content is absolutely vital if you want to rank on the first page of search results.

I’ve seen this for myself over the past few years. It’s pretty much impossible to rank highly online with thin, low quality articles. It might have worked in the past but search engines can spot low quality a mile off.

Unfortunately, Google don’t have an individual person reading your article from top to bottom to see how good it is. They use a number of ranking factors to determine the quality and it’s easy for them to spot the weak from the strong such as:

All of these factors will determine how good your content is and will count towards your rankings.

Here are a few tips to help you content rank higher

• Write at least 1000 words for your article (most of my articles are over 2000 words)
• Try to include your main keyword in the first paragraph
• Include your other keywords naturally throughout the post
• Include images and videos within your blog post
• Link out to other trusted websites online to strengthen your article e.g. Wikipedia

6. Optimising your images for search engines

Most websites use images to brighten up an article or break it up so it’s easier to read. Whilst that is a good thing, it’s also possible to use your images to rank your article higher in search results.

Search engine robots can’t see your images, they can only scan the information that you attach, which is why you need to take care when optimising them.

Image file name

When you save an image onto your computer you have the option to give the file a name. Most images taken with a smartphone or digital camera are saved like this “IMG_00001.jpg”

To save time, people often leave this as it is and upload it to their website. The problem, is that you’re essentially telling Google that “IMG_0001” is what you’re hoping to rank for.

You need to use this opportunity to describe the image so that it fits in nicely with your article.

Take this image of my cat, Muggles for example. The file name is “black-cat-shelf.jpg”

Image size

The file size of your images can also impact your rankings. Make them too big and your website will load slower and create a bad user experience for your visitors.

A standard image size for a picture taken on an iPhone 7 is around 1500 kb (1.5 mb) and 3000px x 4000px in dimensions.

The average laptop screen is around 1200px wide. So that means if you upload an image from your iPhone it’s approximately 3 times larger than it needs to be.

As you can see from this ruler, the width of this blog post is around 750 pixels. There is absolutely no reason for me to upload an image bigger than this.

Even if you re-size the image once it’s on your website, it’s still been uploaded as a big file and this will have repercussions.

Use a website such as Picresize to reduce the size of your images. Keep them as small as possible without losing the quality.

The image of my cat measures 400px wide by 533px tall and the size of the file is 160kb. This is tiny compared to a standard iPhone photo and could easily be reduced even more.

Image alt tags

Once your images have been uploaded to your website, you can add some Alternative text or alt text to explain what the image is. This is how Google rank your images in their image search tool.

Using alt text will also enable you to rank your blog post higher as you are likely using similar keywords throughout the post. I have described the image above using the alt text “Black cat climbing white shelf”

I suppose I could have also used “Muggles destroying my office like she always does” as the alt text. Sigh!

Most content management systems such as WordPress will allow you add alt text without needing to access code.

Tips for optimising images

• Use hyphens (not underscores) in your file names to separate the words
• Use short file names i.e. 2–3 words in length is good
• Include your keywords in the file name e.g. black-cat-shelf.jpg
• Use a tool like www.picresize.com to resize your images BEFORE uploading them
• Use the batch feature on the same website to upload multiple images
• Use sentence form in your alt tags
• Include your keywords in your alt tags e.g. black cat
• Describe the image “Black cat climbing white shelf”

7. Use internal links

If you want to rank highly, your website should act as a valuable resource within your niche. Your articles are certainly going to help with this but you need to make the most of them. An internal link is where you create a hyperlink from one post to another relevant post.

You can use a number of internal links within your blog posts to help your visitors navigate through your website seamlessly and allow them to consume more of your content.

The more pages your visitor views will show Google that your website is valuable and they’ll likely send you more relevant traffic.

Links can also be used to show search engines that your content is trustworthy. Each link pointed to an article counts as a little “vote”. It’s a good idea to try and link to each post on your website at least once.

Another way to help Google rank your articles is to use keywords within your hyperlink when linking to a page. This is called anchor text. For instance, if I’m linking to a page talking about “SEO Jargon”, I would want to hyperlink the words SEO Jargon and not words like “click here” or “find out more”. This is a common mistake that lots of people make but it’s quite easy to fix.

• Include a few internal links to other relevant articles on your website
• Use keywords within your anchor text
• Don’t use too many links as this will affect visitor experience and look messy

8. Search engine title (Title Tag) (this appears in search results)

Not to be confused with the blog post title in step 2. Title tags are not visible on your website. They are mainly used by search engines to determine what your page is about.

Title tags are another important aspect of SEO. Each page on your website will need to have its own title. The same goes for each of your blog posts. Although the title tag is mainly for search engines your users will still be able to see it within search results, so it’s important to take care when choosing your title tags.

The title will be display on the search engine results page. As you can see it’s displayed in big blue text.

You can edit your Title in your website dashboard. Here is what it looks like in WordPress.

How to choose the best title tags for your blog posts

• Stick within 55 characters in length – If not, it may get automatically cut off and…
• Make sure you include your main keyword
• Use short sentences e.g. “SEO checklist for Optimising Blog Post”
• Avoid stuffing titles with too many keywords e.g “SEO Checklist. Best SEO checklist Blog Post, SEO”
• Use hyphens (-) or pipes (|) to separate sentences. It looks neater.

9. Make the most of your meta description (Google shows this before someone visits your website)

Each blog post you publish will have its own meta description. It’s the small grey text beneath the URL on the Google results listings.

As you can see, it’s longer than the title tag so there’s more room to include more information. Unlike the Title tag, Meta Descriptions are no longer classed as a strong ranking factor. However, they are still extremely important.

The words you use here will determine how many people click on your listing rather than the other results on Google. A compelling description will dramatically increase your click through rate.

A lot of businesses don’t spend the time producing quality meta descriptions and miss out on visitors.

You can edit your Meta Description in your website dashboard and it’s usually right next to your search engine title (title tag)

Top tips for meta descriptions

• Use 130–150 characters in your description
• Ask a question e.g. Are you writing blog posts that nobody reads?…
• Include a call to action where possible

10. Categories and Tags

Categories and tags are used to structure the content on your website. You can group certain content together by assigning a number of categories and/or tags. Although they don’t have a massive SEO benefit, this will make things easier for your visitors when browsing your website.

There are no hard and fast rules about categories and tags but I like to follow a certain system that makes sense for users and search engines.

Using categories

A category is usually used as the MAIN topic of the post. For this post I’ve used “SEO”. I only tend to use one category per post but you could use more if you really needed to.

Using tags

Tags are used as extra topics that you speak about throughout the post. I usually use 5 per blog post and for this one, I used SEO, Blog, Blogging, Content and Content Marketing.

As you can see, I’ve used SEO for the category and also a tag.

I’ve found that by structuring each post this way, it allows me find my own content easier and has a nice clean pattern for my visitors to follow too.

Related content

I also have a section at the bottom of my blog posts that show related content. Depending on which post you’re reading, different content will appear based on the categories and tags I’ve chosen.

Top tips for using categories and tags

• Try to use one category
• Use a number of tags for any sub-categories
• Try to keep a similar process for all future posts

11. Social media signals help rankings

Social media plays an important role in how Google views your content. Blog posts that get lots of likes and shares show search engines that your content is interesting and/or valuable. On the flip side, if your content doesn’t have as many, Google may favour other content on the web and show them higher up in search results.

Most SEO software such as Moz now includes social media counters to encourage you to focus on increasing these social signals.

There are a number of things you can do with your blog articles to encourage people to like and share them.

• Include a social sharing bar like we have on the left of this article
• Include tweetables to make tweeting your content easier
• Ask for shares as your call to action
• Include links to online influencers and brands. They’ll likely share it too.

What next?

So now you have a list of things you can do before, during and after you’ve written a blog post. Even if you aren’t able to do every single one, you’ll still put yourself in a very strong position to rank well in search engines.

If all that seems a little overwhelming or time-consuming, then check out our SEO content writing service. This is a full blog management service where we do all of your content creation for you, from keyword research and content strategy, to writing the content and optimising it! This saves you up to 10 hours a week doing it all yourself! Good eh?

Or if you want to up your SEO-game yourself, check out our SEO quiz! It takes just two minutes to do, and when you’re finished you’ll find out your SEO score and get a personalised report which tells you exactly how to improve your site for SEO!

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post SEO for Blog Posts – The Ultimate Checklist appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

With all the jargon floating around, how can you even begin to get started?

It’s not enough that you have to manage your website yourself, now you have to have a degree in marketing to work out what people are talking about.

That is exactly why I wrote this blog post; I wanted to break down all the different words and acronyms you might come across and explain what they all mean.

Let’s get started.

301 and 302 redirects

A redirect is used if you want to redirect your visitors from one page to another. You might do this for numerous reasons:

• You’ve changed your domain name
• You’ve altered a URL,
• You may have deleted a page.

The difference between the two: A 301 is a permanent redirect and 302 a temporary redirect.

404 Pages

A 404 page is the error page that appears on your website if someone mistypes a URL or tries to visit an old page that no longer exists. They will reach the 404 page. The standard 404 error page is usually not very attractive, so it’s a good idea to amend it if you can.

Alt Text

Alt text is short for alternative text. It can be used to describe your images as you add them to your website. Search engines will use your Alt text to determine what is depicted in the image so they can list it in search results. You can read more about ALT text and how to use it in our blog post: how to optimise your blog posts.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text you use within a hyperlink. For instance, the anchor text used in this sentence is “web design”, and it links to the web design page on our website. Search engines take note of the word/phrase within the anchor text when ranking a website in search results.

AMP

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s one step up from having a responsive website. A website that uses AMP will load instantly, creating a better experience for your mobile visitors. It will get rid of any unnecessary clutter that slows down the website. It’s still early days, and in my opinion, it’s not necessary right now for you to use AMP.

Adwords

Adwords is Google’s advertising platform. It is a pay per click service that will display your advert in the paid sections of the search engine results page.

Backlinks

Backlinks or inbound links occur when another website includes a hyperlink back to your website. Generally speaking, the more high quality backlinks you have, the more credible you are to search engines. You can learn more about backlinks in our blog post, SEO for Beginners.

Back-end

The term “back-end” refers to the back office of your website. This is the login dashboard area where you can make changes to your website.

Browser

A browser is a tool used to access the internet. Popular browsers include Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Black Hat

The term “black-hat” refers to a type of SEO (search engine optimisation). Black hat tactics are used to manipulate search engines into believing a website is more credible than it actually is. This includes buying lots of backlinks, spam comments, keyword stuffing.

Generally speaking, black hat techniques work well for a very short period of time but then you risk having your website penalised.

CMS

A CMS or content management system is a simple editing system that allows you to make changes to your website easily. Most people will be able to make changes without any technical web design background. As long as you learn the basics of the framework, you’ll be able to add, edit and delete text and images on your website.

Content

Website “Content” refers to all information that’s visible on your website such as blog posts, regular pages, images and videos. Generally speaking, websites that have more valuable content will perform better in search results. It will also help your potential prospect to gather more information before they get in touch.

Content Marketing / Inbound Marketing

CM or content marketing is the process of using your own content to attract more interested customers. This could involve blogging, recording helpful videos and spreading the word with social media. This is usually cheaper than paid advertising and has proven to be a lot more successful than traditional forms of advertising.

CSS

CSS stands for Custom Style Sheet. It allows you to take your basic HTML website and add some styling. Everything from colours, font styles and font sizes right through to the width of your website, the size of your header and footer and everything else in between. Without CSS every website would look exactly the same.

Conversion

A website conversion means you have taken your website visitor and ”converted” them into an enquiry or sale. You have taken them from a browser into a genuine opportunity. Learn more about how to ‘convert’ your website visitors into leads or sales. 

CRO

CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation. This is the process of fine-tuning the style and layout of your pages in the hopes of increasing the number of enquiries and sales.

CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. That’s a mouthful. Essentially, it’s a tool that’s used to prevent spam messages. You can add it to the comments section of your blog posts or at the bottom of your contact forms. It will validate that the user is human.

Domain

A domain name is essentially the name of your website. It’s the address for anyone looking to visit your website.

E.g. Jammydigital.com

You can buy as many domain names as you like but you would normally only use one per website.

A lot of people ask us if they should use their name or company name as their domain name. And it really does depend. Have a read of the article to find out more.

DA

DA stands for Domain Authority, and it’s calculated by MOZ (an SEO software company). It measures your domain and scores it out of 100 based on a number of factors. A brand new website will score 1/100 and Facebook.com scores 100/100. DA is calculated based on the number of backlinks you have, the quality of those backlinks, your social media activity and a few other metrics.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to website content that is the same (or very similar) to another piece of content on the internet. This can happen by mistake on your own website or content can be stolen and placed on someone else’s website. Either way search engines may penalise the websites in question.

Dofollow

Every single link on the internet will either be classed as a do-follow link or nofollow link. Dofollow means that the website who created the link wants search engines to take note and count the link as a “valuable resource”. This is generally done by default and you don’t have to do anything else.

DNS

DNS is short for Domain Name Servers. Without getting too technical, DNS will translate your domain name (which is what humans see) into an IP Address (which is what computers see). Each website has it’s own identity and by checking the DNS you can find out more information about the domain and hosting.

Disavow

Building backlinks is an important part of SEO. However, not all links are high quality. If you do have a number of bad links, Google will allow you to remove or DISAVOW them using Google Search Console.

EMD

An EMD stands for Exact Match Domain. This relates to a domain name which includes the exact keyword you want to rank for. If we had chosen to opt for an EMD we might have bought webdesignmanchester.com or web-design-manchester.co.uk

Editorial Calendar

I use an editorial calendar to plan my blog posts. It’s like any other calendar but it allows me to see the status of a piece of content (to-do, draft, pending review and scheduled). It’s a great way for me to stay ahead of the content I’m planning to produce.

Favicon

A Favicon is the small icon that appears in the tab on any given website. It usually measures 16×16 pixels, and you can create your own and add it to your website.

File Name

Each image that you upload to your website will have its own file name. It will be whatever it was saved as. E.g. image3215.jpg. Google recommend that you use a descriptive file name e.g. black-cat.jpg. That way you have more chance of search engines listing your images in search results. To learn more about how to name your images correctly, read our blog post on how to optimise your blog posts.

GeoTagging

GeoTaggging allows you to tag images and videos with a specific geographical location. This is useful for anyone wanting to rank highly for a location e.g. A restaurant in Manchester. Google are more likely to list images of your business for these search queries.

Google

The light of my life. When Google says jump, I say, how high?

Google Analytics

GA or Google Analytics is the go-to visitor tracking tool for most website owners. It’s free and provides a lot of information about your visitors e.g. number of visitors, how they found your website and your most popular pages. You can add your website to Google Analytics here.

Google Search Console

Previously named Webmaster Tools, Search Console is the best way to check on the health of your website. Providing you add your website sitemap to your search console account, you’ll be able to check for any broken links, crawl errors and check for new backlinks.

H1 tags and H2, H3, H4, H5, H6

H tags are headings on a page. You can label certain text as headings to show search engines that the content is important. Pages headings and subheadings are also important for your users, as it breaks up the content making it more digestible. H1 is usually the main heading on a page and H2 to H6 tags are used for the sub-headings. Learn more about how to use headings correctly for SEO.

Hosting

Every website on the internet needs hosting. It’s the only way people will be able to access your website. Think of hosting as like renting space on the internet. We recommend using Siteground as a host as they offer great support (online chat, which is always handy!)

HTML

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It’s the main method used to build most websites. HTML will allow you to create a website using tags such as;

<H1>-<H6> to assign headings on a page
<p> to assign standard paragraph text
<img> to add images

Websites that only use HTML look very basic and it’s very rare that this will be the only method used to create a website. If you want to add any kind of style or theme you will need to use some CSS.

Indexed

The word indexed refers to your website being listed in search results. New websites usually take a few days to be indexed by search results, and this also goes for new pages that you add.

Infographics

An infographic is an image which is usually made up of statistics and graphs. It’s a more interesting way to take bland research and make it more visually appealing.

Inbound Links – Backlinks

An inbound link is a hyperlink from someone else’s website to yours. You can check how many inbound links you have using various online tools such as Majestic SEO.

Internal Links

An internal link is a hyperlink on a website that points to another page on that SAME website. For instance, this link goes to my about page so it’s classed as an internal link. To learn more about internal links, have a read of our post, the Ultimate Beginners’ Guide to SEO.

Jetpack

Jetpack is an all-in-one WordPress plugin that allows you to add additional features to your website easily. It’s a great tool for beginners who want to quickly add contact forms, extra sidebars and related blog posts.

Javascript

Javascript is a method used when creating websites. It allows web designers to improve your website with additional features like image sliders and pops ups. It’s very uncommon for a website to NOT use javascript.

Keywords

Keywords are words/phrases that you are trying to rank for in search engines. You might have a number of keywords you would like to be on the first page for. It’s a good idea to collect these and include these phrases throughout your website.

E.g. Hotels Manchester, Manchester hotels.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of finding better keywords to target. You can use free and/or paid tools to search for popular phrases people use online. You can accumulate a list of keywords and then plan how you intend to include these topics on your website. One of the biggest mistakes when it comes to SEO is a lack of keyword research!

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is classed as a blackhat method. It’s trying to manipulate Google by including too many of the same words. It’s very easy for Google to spot and it makes for a terrible user experience. When your write a sentence like this: “We do web design for people looking for web design services. Check out our web design experience here…” It does not read well.

This happens a lot and my advice is to keep things natural and avoid this practice.

Logo

A logo is your company identity. It can be created using a combination of text, icons, images or all of the above. It’s usually saved using the following file type .jpg, .jpeg, png.

Lead

A lead is a sales opportunity for your company. It might be a phone call, an email enquiry or a call back request.

Lead Capture

A lead capture is how your website captures your customer’s data. This might be a form on your website that allows people to fill it in so that you can speak with the prospective customer. To understand more about how to capture leads on your website, have a look at our blog post: how to create a lead generating website.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is used to increase the chances of gaining leads through your website. This could be a free gift in exchange for your customer’s contact information e.g. a free ebook, a free video course or a free consultation, which are all common forms of lead magnets.

Long Tail keywords

Long Tail keywords are longer keywords that you’re trying to rank highly for e.g. “WordPress web designers in Manchester” as opposed to shorter keywords such as “web design”. Yes, the long tail version is not searched for as frequently, BUT it’s a lot easier to rank higher because it’s not as competitive. One of the biggest SEO mistakes people make is not considering these longer keywords, and instead, aiming for a highly competitive keyword.

Meta Data

Metadata is the data for your website. It’s used by search engines to find out what your website is about. You might not be able to see this information from looking at your website but search engines can so it’s important you optimise it.

Meta Description

Each page on your website can have its own meta description. You can use it to describe the content on that page using 155 characters. This snippet is displayed in search results in grey beneath your website URL. Although search engines do not use this text as a ranking factor, it is still extremely important. It is best practice to have a unique meta description for every page. We teach you exactly how to write a great meta description in our SEO starter pack.

Meta Keywords

Adding Meta Keywords to your website is no longer effective. It used to be a great way to optimise your pages by adding a list of keywords that you wanted to rank for. I haven’t used them in years and you don’t have to either.

Nofollow links

There are some occasions where a website may want to class a link as “nofollow”. By creating a nofollow link, this means you are telling search engines to not pay attention to it. There are many reasons you might want to do this e.g. paid links have to be nofollow. Links within blog comments are usually nofollow to prevent them from being spammed.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the process of editing the different elements on your website to make it more appealing to search engines. Everything from your title tags to alt tags can be optimised for a more search engine friendly website. We cover everything you need to know about on-page SEO in our SEO Starter Pack.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO can also be described as online PR. It’s the process of building a strong reputation with search engines using guest posts, social media and business directory listings.

Opt-in

An opt-in is when someone signs up to your email newsletter or a free giveaway. They “opt-in” to receive some kind of information. This is sometimes called a conversion.

Plugins

Plugins are like add-ons for your website. If you want a new image gallery or an email signup form you don’t have to build it from scratch or pay a developer. You can simply find a plugin. If you’re using WordPress, then you can search the plugin library and install it yourself in seconds.

PPC

PPC stands for Pay Per Click which is a form of online advertising. It’s different from traditional advertising such as radio ads and billboards because PPC only charges you if someone physically clicks on your advert.

Quick

How quickly your website loads could impact your search engine rankings. Test your speed using GT Metrix. Providing that your website loads in under 5 seconds you’ll be ok.

Responsive

Having a responsive website means your website takes the shape on any device, no matter how big or small it is. Having a responsive website is very important, and Google will penalise you if your website is not classed as mobile friendly/responsive.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the process of increasing the organic rankings of a website in search results. Google use over 200 different rankings factors when deciding how high you rank in search engines. An SEO agency would optimise as many of these ranking factors as possible to give you the best chance of ranking highly. SEO can be split into two major categories: On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

Have a read of our article, if you’re not sure whether to hire an SEO agency or do SEO yourself.

SERP

SERP is an abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page that appears after someone has typed in a phrase in the search field using Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Title Tags

Title tags or page titles are an extremely important ranking factor. It’s vital that every page on your website has a title tag so that search engines know what that page is about. You have around 55 characters to use and it’s always best to include your main target keywords within the title. You can also see the page titles in search results. It appears in blue above the URL. We teach you exactly how to optimise your title tags in our SEO Starter Pack.

Themes/Templates

Themes or templates allow you to create a good-looking website quickly. You can install a free or paid template to make your website without the need of a web developer. Websites like ThemeForest allow you to install templates for less than £100.

UX

UX stands for user experience, and it’s used to describe the experience a website visitor has navigating through your website. There are lots of web developers that don’t consider users when designing their websites and this could have an impact on your enquiries and sales. User experience is one of the 6 key elements that make a successful website.

Voice

You may have heard of the term “finding your voice” when discussing website content. It means finding a style that suits you and writing in a way so that people would recognise you. It takes practice to write like this, but when you do find your voice, people will generally engage more.

WordPress (.org)

WordPress (.org) is the most widely used content management system. It’s a free tool that you can add to your website that allows you to make changes easily without the need of a web developer.

WordPress (.com)

The .COM version of WordPress is completely different from the .ORG. It’s confusing I know. It’s far less popular and has far more restrictions. It’s quite handy if you want a simple personal blog but not so useful if you want a high-quality business website.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO is classed as the ethical method to increasing your organic rankings in search engines. It involves following the rules that Google set, such as earning backlinks with valuable content and avoiding any unethical tactics that may harm your rankings. White Hat techniques are what we teach in our SEO Starter Pack.

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is short for What You See Is What You Get. Most content management systems come with an easy to use editing system that allows you to make changes using a WYSIWYG editor as you can see below. It allows you to format your page or post with ease.

XML-Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of web pages that you have on your website, and an XML sitemap is a file containing the list. You can download your XML sitemap and give it to Google so they can list your pages in search results.

Yoast

Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. It allows you to optimise your website easily to make it search engine friendly. It’s free and fairly simple to use. Click here to find out more information about Yoast.

ZIP

A zip file is an online folder that holds large documents. It has been compressed so that it doesn’t take up much memory whilst being downloaded or sent via email.

Summary

There you have it. 80+ words and phrases that you’re likely to come across at some point or another. At least now, you’ll know what they mean. I will keep adding jargon to this list so be sure to bookmark this page and come back to it as and when you need it.

Over to you

Have I missed anything out? I’m sure I have. Feel free to leave a comment below, and I’ll add it to the list and let you know once it’s done.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Web Design & SEO Jargon Buster appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

It’s not always easy to answer this question. If you’re not a designer or a techie, then how would you know where to start?

You might like the colours and images, or the general layout and design but a website is so much more than that.

Friends and family could offer feedback and tell you what they like and don’t like, but with so many conflicting views, who should you listen to?

In most cases, you’re going to trust that your web designer has delivered a high-quality website, or that the software you’ve used to build your site is good enough.

But what if it isn’t?

What if you’re missing out on enquiries or what if your design is turning people off?

What makes a website great?

From experience, it’s not enough to simply HAVE a website. A website should deliver you results, and if it’s not, then something is wrong.

I’ve created a website self-assessment tool. You can use it to grade your own website and get immediate feedback on what you can do to improve.

How does it work?

Having reviewed so many websites over the years, I realised that most businesses make very similar mistakes.

I’ve put together a list of the 30 questions that you can answer about your website. The answers will give an indication of how well your website is performing.

Each topic has three scenarios. All you have to do is read through each of them and select which statement is most accurate for you.

Once you’ve done you’ll be given your score.

What do the scores mean?

Score	Grade	What does this mean?
80–90	Grade A	Seriously sexy website
70–79	Grade B	Great job. Well done!
60–69	Grade C	Pretty good but still work to do.
50–59	Grade D	Not good. Lots of work to do.
40–49	Grade E	Back to the drawing board.
30–39	Grade F	Warning! You're losing customers!

Please be as honest as possible when answering the questions. If you need any clarification feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

Let’s get started.

Grade my website

Or…

use the guide below and add up your scores

Q1 – How would you describe your use of taglines?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You have been fluffy or vague with your tagline. It’s not easy for someone to understand what you do by reading it. e.g. We help you prosper, live happy, we help businesses.	1
It’s clear from your tagline what you do. It might not be memorable or descriptive but it’s enough to get your point across. e.g. Accounting services, We help you sell your house.	2
Your tagline is strong. It clearly explains who you help and what you help them to do. It’s memorable and includes a benefit or it differentiates the business. e.g. “A safe place for all your files” - Google Drive “There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard” - Mastercard.	3

Q2 – How accessible are your contact details?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your contact details are hard to find. You don’t make it easy for people to find your contact number or email on your homepage. People have to click through to another page in order to find key information.	1
You display your contact details on the homepage but it’s not in a prominent position and it could be missed. It might be quite small and placed in the footer area.	2
Your contact details are easy to see, and they are in a prominent position on each page. The contact number is large and clickable from a mobile device. There is a link that redirects to the contact page on your website.	3

Q3 – How does your logo look on your website?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your logo isn’t clear. It might look pixelated and some of the elements within your logo are difficult to read. It doesn’t look right if it’s resized.	1
Your logo is easy to see but it’s too big. You take up more space than you need to and this means other information gets moved further down the page.	2
Your logo fits perfectly and it doesn’t take up much space. It looks in proportion with the other elements on the page, and it resizes without losing clarity.	3

Q4 – Do you have a strong call to action?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t have a clear call to action on your site. Your website doesn’t direct people where you want them to go. You haven’t thought about what action you want people to take.	1
You have buttons on your website such as “get in touch” and “find out more” but they are not easy to see at first glance. They might be further down the page and could be missed.	2
You have a strong call to action on your homepage and it’s clear to see at first glance. It’s enticing and inspires some kind of action.	3

Q5 – How would you describe your use of images?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t have many images on your website. Your site looks bland and has blocks of text that make it difficult to digest.	1
Your website has a few images but they are not consistent. They might be free stock photos that you added quickly when you launched, but they don’t add much to make you stand out from the crowd.	2
You use images on your site that ADD to the overall appearance. The images are consistent throughout your website and make your visitors feel welcome. You might use professional photographs or high quality stock images. The images complement the content and make it more readable.	3

Q6 – Are you clear about what services you offer?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
From looking at your homepage, it’s not clear what services you offer. The descriptions are vague and you don’t go into much detail about your products and services.	1
You talk about your services, but it’s difficult to see at first glance. You might have to search or click through to another page to find it.	2
You clearly explain what services you offer and make it easy to understand. The information is easy to find on your website and the services are near the top of the homepage. They might even be included in your main menu items.	3

Q7 – How much content do you have?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You have very little content. You may have less than 300 words on each page making it difficult for search engines to class your website as valuable or helpful. It’s not easy for potential customers to find out much information about you using your website.	1
You have between 300-400 words of content on each page. This is the minimum recommended word count and search engines will consider this when ranking your pages. The content is quite helpful but could easily be improved with a little time and effort.	2
You have more than 400 words on each page. You go into detail about your services and focus on the questions and concerns of your target market. You are seen as knowledgeable and search engines will rank you highly because of this.	3

Q8 – Is your website customer focused?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your website is mainly about you and your company. You talk a lot about how good you are and how long you’ve been in business, but you don’t talk about your customers' problems and how you can help fix them.	1
Half of your content is about your company and half is about the problems your customers face and how your product solves that problem. You may include features and benefits of your products and services but you could go into a lot more detail.	2
Most of the content on your website is directed at your target audience and you speak a lot about the problems they face. Your customers are at the heart of the content you produce. It allows them to understand more about your services and how you can help them solve their problems.	3

Q9 – Do you use jargon on your website?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You use industry Jargon without explaining what the terminology means. For instance, abbreviations like SEO, CRO and CMS can be difficult for people to understand and it can make your visitors feel confused, like they’re out of their depth.	1
You use some Jargon but try to explain as much as possible using brackets. e.g. SEO (search engine optimisation) This allows your users to understand more whilst they browse your website.	2
You use very little jargon on your website and when you do, you write a sentence or two to explain what it means e.g. You can make changes to your website to improve visibility in search results. This is known as search engine optimisation (SEO for short).	3

Q10 – Do you capture your customer’s email address?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t have an email signup form on your website and you’re not building your contact list. This means when people visit your website, you aren’t capturing their contact information.	1
You may have an email signup form on your website but don’t have a free giveaway to entice people. It may say something generic like “signup for updates” or “join our newsletter”.	2
You have an email signup form on your website and you offer an enticing free gift in exchange for their email e.g. free video, ebook or email course. This means you have more chance of capturing their email address.	3

Q11 – How useful is your blog?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t have a blog on your website and you don’t update your website with fresh content on a regular basis. If you do, it’s mainly industry news and updates about your company.	1
You have a blog but you don’t update it regularly. It has some interesting content but it mainly consists of list posts. Your blog posts could be more focused on helping your customers learn more and make an informed buying decision.	2
Your blog is a valuable resource for your website visitors. It’s helpful and answers questions that your prospective customers might have. You update it regularly (1-2 twice per month min) and each post contains either helpful advice, entertaining content or a new insight. It’s clear from your blog that you are an expert in your space.	3

Q12 – How would you describe your menu/navigation?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your main menu or navigation bar is difficult to use. It might not be visible at first glance, and it might not look like a standard menu i.e. Horizontal or vertical. Some important pages are hidden and cannot be accessed by using the menu.	1
Your main menu is clear and it’s easy to see, but it’s not entirely obvious what you do at a first glance. Your visitor may have to click through to another page to work out what you do to find out more.	2
You have a clear, useful navigation area. It’s easy to use and it’s obvious what services you offer from looking at the menu items. You avoid wasted space and each page on your website is accessible within three clicks of the mouse.	3

Q13 – How would you describe your use of colours?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You have chosen your website colours at random and no real thought has gone into it. You don’t have a style that matches your brand. It’s inconsistent with your social media profiles and doesn’t look very appealing.	1
You have have used a very basic colour scheme on your website (1-2 colours). You might use a main colour but you haven’t considered why you use it and how you might improve the look and feel with more variety. The sections you want to highlight don’t stand out on the page because of the lack of colour variation.	2
You have chosen a specific colour scheme for your website, and you’ve used 3-5 colours throughout the design. You may have used colour swatches or online tools to come up with the ideas and the colours are consistent with your brand style and social media profiles. Your colour scheme keeps people engaged and allows you to highlight call to action buttons throughout your website.	3

Q14 – How readable is your content?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your text is very small. You use a font size 10 pts or smaller which makes it difficult to read for most people. The colour is fairly light on a white background and the headlines don’t stand out. This means people will find it more difficult to read.	1
You use a font size of 12-14 pts and it’s relatively easy to read your content. Your headlines are clear but the colours are similar which means it might not be as readable as it could be.	2
A majority of the text on your website is font size 14-18pts This means it will be extremely clear and easy to read on desktops and mobile devices. You use a variety of bold headings and bullet points to break up the content and you may use some colour to make certain sections stand out.	3

Q15 – How would you describe your choice of fonts?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You use more than 3 font styles on your website and no real considerations has gone into why. You may have included non-standard fonts like Lobster and Comic Sans that bring down the quality of your website.	1
You use basic fonts that are easy to read. You might have chosen your fonts quickly when you launched your website and have kept them the same ever since. The site might be lacking some personality.	2
You have chosen your fonts carefully. You use 2 main fonts and the style is consistent on each page of your website. It’s in-keeping with your brand and adds personality to your website. The font choices look good together and make it easy to read.	3

Q16 – How do you use internal links to your advantage?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You have no links to other pages on your website. You may even have some broken links that lead to 404 error pages. This makes for a bad user experience and will impact your Bounce rate in Google Analytics.	1
You have some internal links throughout your website but generally use hyperlinks like “click here” or “visit this page”.	2
You have links on every page of your website that allow your visitors to click through to your other content. You use your Keywords as the hyperlinks e.g. Web Design or Website Critique Service rather than “Click here”	3

Q17 – How quickly does your website load?

(Note. You can check your page load speed using GT Metrix)

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load. It feels sluggish and this means it’s a bad experience for your website visitor. This may also affect your rankings.	1
Your pages take between 3–5 seconds to load. This is within Google’s recommended speed which means it won’t affect your rankings but it could still be improved. There are still things slowing down your website and this could cause your website to slow down in the future.	2
You page load speed is under 3 seconds and your page size is under 2MB. This means your users get to see your website quicker and are more likely to stick around.	3

Q18 – Is your website mobile friendly?

(Note. You can check if your website is responsive by using the mobile friendly tool)

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your website is not mobile friendly, It doesn’t look neat and tidy when viewed on a smartphone or tablet. It may require dragging and pinching to view the whole page.	1
You have a website that looks ok on mobile device. No dragging and pinching. It passes the mobile friendly test but you don’t have a dedicated mobile design. Some key information is harder to find when your site is viewed on a mobile device.	2
Your website has been built with mobile devices in mind. It’s more than “responsive”. It’s been designed to be efficient on smaller screens rather than just accessible. The call to actions are still visible and the contact information is easy to access.	3

Q19 – Do you use a variety of media throughout your website?

E.g. video and audio podcasts

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t use videos or audio on your website. You only use text and images to communicate with your visitors.	1
You use one or two videos but they are used to explain what you do. But you don’t use it to help, educate or entertain your website visitors.	2
You include videos within your pages and/or blog posts to enhance the user experience. You may use a video on your homepage to explain more about your products and services. You may even include video testimonials from your clients. You use videos and or audio to help, educate or entertain your website visitors	3

Q20 – How do you use social media within your website?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t include any reference to social media or have any social sharing facilities on your website that increase your authority in Google	1
You have links to social media but you don’t really have a strategy on how you can use social media within your website to increase exposure.	2
Social media plays a big part of your content strategy. You use social media throughout your website to make sharing easier.	3

Q21 – Do you use testimonials on your website?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t have any testimonials from previous clients. There is no proof that your services have impacted anyone in a positive way.	1
You have some customer feedback on your website but there isn’t any in-depth details about the project and the journey that lead to the testimonial.	2
You have authentic testimonials from your clients. They go beyond “would highly recommend” and they talk about where they were before working with you and where they are today. They are relatable to prospective clients and they help people imagine themselves having the same transition.	3

Q22 – Do you use case studies on your website?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t have any case studies on your website. There is no way that your website visitors can see the journey of your previous clients.	1
You may have 2-3 case studies on your website but you focus mainly on the project and what you did. You’ll talk about analytics and results and you don’t really focus on the client and their story.	2
You have produced a number of case studies from previous projects. You tell the story of your client rather than stats about the project. You walk through the transition honestly including the ups and downs.	3

Q23 – How unique is your content?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You have used the same or similar content on numerous pages. You may have copied and pasted some text on each page to increase your word count.	1
You have used different content on each page but it may be very similar. You may have used snippets from other pages.	2
Each page on your website has completely unique content. It has been written as an individual page and offers valuable information.	3

Q24 – Do you use added software on your website?

E.g. drag and drop software that may slow your website down.

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your website is entirely built using drag and drop software. This can cause your website to load slower and be less accessible to search engines.	1
You use a standard content management system like WordPress but you use additional software to make changes e.g. visual composer, Divi or Elementor. This software creates a lot of unnecessary code and it tends to affect your page load speed.	2
You don’t use any extra software on your website. With the exceptions of themes and plugins, your website is managed using standard web design practices and this keeps it running smoothly.	3

Q25 – How many content web pages do you have?

*Not including shopping pages.

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You have less than 10 pages on your website, which shows search engines that you offer very little value to your end user.	1
You have 10–30 web pages. This is a good indication that your content may be of value to your website visitors.	2
You have more than 30 pages on your website. This may consist of regular pages and blog posts. You have a content driven website that acts as a resource to your prospective clients.	3

Q26 – Does the personality of your business shine through?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
Your website is plain. It lacks character and doesn’t fit with your personality or that of your company. This could make it difficult for people to remember.	1
You have considered the look and feel of your website and you’ve tried to make it interesting, but there is room for improvement. There are still things you can add to bring it to life.	2
From looking at your website, it’s clear that you have a strong brand. Your personality shines through and people are likely to have a memorable experience.	3

Q27 – Do you show your staff/team on your website?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t display pictures of yourself or your team on your website. This can feel impersonal and isn’t very transparent.	1
You do include images of yourself and your team but it’s quite basic. You may have standard photos with professional bios.	2
You have an entertaining meet the team page. It’s fun and everybody’s personality shines through. It’s less professional and more honest.	3

Q28 – Do you answer customer questions?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t answer prospect questions on your website. You don’t have an FAQ and you don’t use your blog to answer questions.	1
You may have an FAQ on your website and/or answer questions via your blog but you don’t go into detail. You have 1-2 sentences for each question and it acts as a Q&A.	2
Customers questions drive your content. Most of your web pages will allow prospects to find answers to questions they never knew they had. Your site makes it easy for people to make an informed buying decision.	3

Q29 – Does your website look cluttered?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You have a lot of options on your homepage. It’s difficult to see the important elements because you have too much going on. You may have tried to include as much as possible in an effort to not miss anything out.	1
You have been quite selective about the options you have available on your homepage but there is still room to improve. You could be strict and eliminate more if you wanted to.	2
You have no clutter on your website. Everything earns its place and everything else gets eliminated. You have been extremely strict and only kept the crucial options available. Fewer options are often appealing to your website visitors.	3

Q30 – Do you discuss cost or pricing on your website?

Which statement is most accurate?	Points
You don’t talk about cost and pricing on your website. You avoid giving too much information away in the hopes that the prospect will get in touch. This means you’re holding back information which may frustrate your website visitor.	1
You do have some information about prices on your website. You may have a pricing table or some basic indications, but you don’t go into much detail and explain why you charge what you do.	2
You openly discuss costs and pricing on your website. You provide honest and transparent information and write blog posts to help your prospects make an informed buying decision. This builds trust and will set you aside from your competition.	3

What score did you get? Comment below!

Score	Grade	What does this mean?
80–90	Grade A	Seriously sexy website
70–79	Grade B	Great job. Well done!
60–69	Grade C	Pretty good but still work to do.
50–59	Grade D	Not good. Lots of work to do.
40–49	Grade E	Back to the drawing board.
30–39	Grade F	Warning! You're losing customers!

Summary

Hopefully, you now have a better idea of how good (or bad) your website is. You shouldn’t be disheartened if your score is low, but you will certainly want to look at the questions again and spend some time planning how you’re going to improve it.

If you would like our help, why not book a website critique via the link below. We’ll record a personalised video telling you exactly what you can do to improve it.

Book a website critique

Over to you

How did you get on with the self-assessment? Were you surprised with your grade? I’d love to hear from you so please let me know in the comments below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post How good is your website? Grade it yourself appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

I totally get it…you’ve got a great-looking website, you’re proud of it, but you’re frustrated.

No one can find you on Google.

You could have the best-looking website in the world but if people can’t find you online you won’t get any enquires or sales.

As a web design agency who ALSO specialise in SEO, we get asked these questions all the time by potential clients:

– Why can’t our prospective customers find us on Google?
– What do we need to do to get our website on the 1st page of Google?

Google is the number one most visited website and it drives the majority of search traffic to websites in the world. That’s why it’s so important to have a strong presence in search results.

It’s really important that you as the business owner understand what’s wrong with your website and what you can do to fix it.

Having reviewed hundreds of websites over the past few years, I’ve found that there are 11 main reasons why your website is not ranking well in search results.

So, if you are frustrated with the performance of your website, and you want to fast track to the solutions to fix it, you’ve come to the right place.

1. Competitors

Let’s face it. Some industries are more crowded than others, and some of your competitors might have a huge marketing budget behind them. This is why you might not be ranking on the first page for your main keywords.

How can you check for competitors?

A simple Google search for your main products or services will give you some indication of the size and weight of your competition.

Take a look at the search below for “beds for sale”.

As you can see, the number of results is ridiculous (over 173 million). Although lots of these results aren’t relevant, you’re still competing with the likes of DFS, Argos and Dreams. These are all huge organisations, and the chance of you getting your small-business website on the first page is slim to none.

What can you do about your competition?

You could try to focus on a particular segment of your target market.

Rather than trying to rank nationally for the keyword “Beds for sale” you could instead focus on a local audience, such as “Beds for sale in Manchester”.

If you go after a smaller market, there’s less competition and more chance of ranking higher for that geographical location.

Another option would be to find a niche within your industry. Rather than aiming for “Beds for sale” you could go for “Children’s beds for sale”.

There is far less competition for more specific searches, and you stand a better chance of performing well in search results.

You have to be realistic, and if your competitors are all large organisations, then you may have to adjust your strategy. You’ll thank me in the long run.

2. Google has not indexed your website

If you have a brand-new website and you’re not showing up on Google, it may be because Google hasn’t listed you yet.

How to find out if your website is indexed.

So, how would you know if your website is listed on Google?

You can find out by using the following prefix in a google search.

site:yoursite.com  (without the “www.” and “/”)

If you can see your website showing in search results and you’re at the top, you have nothing to worry about. This means you are indexed. Usually, you will see a full list of all your web pages, and that’s what you’re hoping for.

On the other hand, if you’re not at the top or showing up at all then the likelihood is that Google hasn’t indexed your website yet.

How can you index your website with Google?

Google should eventually find your website anyway, but it can take a few weeks. Not only that, if something is wrong with your site you won’t know about until weeks down the line.

The best thing you can do is to add your website to Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) and provide them with your sitemap.

This will tell Google which pages you want to show up in their search results and speed the process along. It will also tell you if there are any technical errors on your website.

3. Your website is not mobile friendly

There’s no doubt about it. Mobile usage is overtaking desktop, which is why having a mobile friendly website is vital. If you don’t, it will seriously impact your rankings in mobile search results.

Ideally, your website should be “responsive”, this means when your site is viewed on a mobile phone or an iPad it will take the shape of that particular device. It shouldn’t be hard work and require any dragging and pinching. This is bad user experience, hence the reason Google will punish you.

How to find out if your website is responsive

To find out if you have a responsive website visit Google’s very own Mobile Friendly Test tool and enter your website URL.

It will show you either as a pass or a fail.

How can you make your website responsive

If a web designer created your website, speak to them about making it responsive. If you’re lucky, it won’t be too expensive!

If you use WordPress and manage your website yourself, you could install a new WordPress theme that is responsive. You may also be able to keep the same theme but buy an additional plugin to make it pass the mobile-friendly test.

Worst case scenario, you may have to have your website re-designed. It’s not always easy to convert an old website, and it might be easier to spend the money on a new design entirely.

It is extremely important to have a responsive website, for both SEO and user-experience.

4. Meta tags not optimised

Search engines use Meta data to work out what your website is about. Each one of your webpages will have its own set of meta tags and they can be optimised to describe the content on that page.

Some of this information will actually show up in search results so you need to know how to change it as it’s often the first thing your visitors will see before they click through to your site.

Your Title Tags and your Meta Descriptions

How can you check you meta-data?

You can use this tool to collect a list of your pages along with their meta tags. Simple paste your URLs into the box and click submit. You’ll be able to download the full list and see what Google can see.

Provided you are using a Content Management System such as WordPress you will have access to update your meta tags very easily using the settings for each page.

How can you improve your Title Tags

Your Title Tags are extremely important and they WILL impact your search engines rankings depending on what you include within them. Here are a few tips:

• Include the keywords you want to rank for
• Keep the length under 55 characters to avoid search engines cutting it short
• Use a sentence structure like “Bed Sales On Single & Double Beds” rather than “Beds | Single Beds | Double Beds | Cheap Beds”

How can you improve your Meta descriptions?

You meta descriptions don’t count towards your rankings but they do count towards your click through rate. This is why they are important. Here a few tips:

• Ask a question? This is a good way to entice your potential visitor e.g. Why is my website not ranking in Google?
• Keep the length under 155 characters to avoid search engines cutting it short
• Include a call to action to or phone number to make it easier for people to get in touch

WordPress SEO

If you are using the WordPress platform, then you can install the Yoast SEO plugin and make changes very easily.

For more On-page SEO tips you can read this article.

5. Poor content optimisation

Have you optimised your website content for search engines?

Believe it or not, Google does actually need your help. We’d like to think that they have all the answers, but in fact, you have some work to do yourself.

There are over 200 indicators that Google use to rank your website in search results. Most of which can be improved by adding and editing different elements on your website including your meta tags like we mentioned in step 4.

How can you find out if your on-page SEO is bad?

You can use my free tool to check your SEO Score. Input your website URL and place the keyword you want to rank highly for and hit enter.

It will give you a score out of 100 and tell you which areas need your attention.

How can you improve your on-page SEO?

I would recommend that you focus on one main topic for each page of your website. Everything from the page headings, image file names and internal links will need to be considered if you want strong search engines rankings.

6. Not enough quality content

I honestly believe that high-quality content makes the biggest difference in how well your website performs when it comes ranking highly.

Your website needs to have a good amount of content to perform well in search results. I’ve seen this time and time again. People pay £1000s for a brand-new website and then let themselves down with poor-quality content.

It’s recommended that each page on your website should have at least 300–400 words of content. This will give Google enough confidence that the information on that page is somewhat valuable. Any less than that and your website is probably not going to rank well.

How to check the word count on the page

You can use this tool to count the number of words on each web page. I would recommend that each page on your website should have at least 300–400 words of content. However, there are no hard and fast rules about this.

For instance, most of the pages on my website contain 500–1000 words, and some of my blog posts are over 2000 words long (including this one).

I personally find that the longer the content, the more helpful the information. There is an extra SEO argument for more content. The more content = more opportunity to include more keywords.

How can you fix it?

You can simply edit your existing pages to increase the number of words. You could even pay a writer to produce your content on a regular basis. Prices for a copywriter tend to be around £100–£200 per page depending on the time it takes and the research involved.

Here are my four tips to writing better content.

• Create helpful content that educates your audience.
• Direct your writing at your ideal customer
• Focus on your customers problems and help them fix them
• Stop talking about you so much

7. No high-quality backlinks

Backlinks are exactly as they sound. LINKS that point BACK to your website.

The quality and volume of your backlinks are a strong sign of how trustworthy and reliable your website is. Search engines take this into account when listing your site in search results.

Quality is far more important than quantity when it comes to gaining backlinks. A link from a relevant website in your niche is a lot more valuable than 100 links from low-quality websites.

How to check your backlink profile.

There are a few tools that will show you which websites are linking back to yours.

Free Backlink Checker is a free tool that will give you a list of websites link back to yours.

Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs are paid services that will give you a lot more in the way of metrics and will show you which links are your most powerful ones.

Usually, you can start a free trial to test out the software.

How can you build more high-quality links?

Over time you may naturally gain some links from other websites. However, you can’t rely on this.

How to earn backlinks

If you focus on providing valuable and high-quality content, you will increase your chances of exposure. Providing the on-page elements are optimised as I discussed in step 4 and 5, more people will find your website and want to link back to it.

You can also reach out to other website owners in your space and share your content with them. Hopefully they will link back to it. At the very least you could ask them if they would allow you to write a piece of content for their website and include a backlink within that.

8. No social media activity

If you have a website but don’t use social media, it could impact your search engine rankings. A lack of social media activity is another sign that your website might not be as credible as your competitors. Much like backlinks, social media engagement adds to your overall trust factor. In a nutshell, the more social, the better.

How to audit your social media activity?

Visit BuzzSumo and paste your website URL into their search field. This will show you the most shared content on your website. It is a paid service, but they will show you some information for free.

How can you improve social media engagement?

Make sure you have social media profiles for your business, and you update them regularly with links back to your website. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram are the most popular social media platforms so it would be good to start with these if you haven’t already.

Social media tips

• Focus on providing consistent, high-quality or entertaining content that will increase shares.
• Share your new AND old content across your social media accounts.
• Add social media sharing buttons to your website
• Add Tweetables within each article in order to increase engagement further.

9. Bad Website Builder

If you have built your site yourself using a DIY website builder, you may have difficulty ranking in search results.

I understand the appeal, drag and drop website builders provide an easy and cheap way to create a website within minutes. There’s one problem: I’ve rarely seen a high performing DIY website in search results.

I believe it’s because these tools create a lot of excessive code that will impact the performance of your website.

Here are a few reasons why your DIY website may not rank well.

• Your basic SEO options are limited
• Your web pages generally take longer to load because of all the extra functionality
• You get far fewer SEO plugins compared with other platforms

What can you do if you have a DIY website?

Try your best to optimise your website using the previous steps in this article and make sure your page load speed is under 5 seconds. Aside from that, there’s not a lot you can do. It’s a quick and easy way to get online but don’t expect a flood of traffic.

We recently wrote an article where we compared DIY websites vs web designers. Feel free to take a look to find out more.

If you love your DIY website but are worried about losing the style, then don’t be. Most web designers will be able to build you a website that looks the same, but it would be a lot more efficient.

10. Poor page load speed

Google expect your website to load quickly to keep their users happy. This means under 5 seconds. Any longer than that and you could risk being penalised by Google.

How can check your page load speed?

You can find out how long your website takes to load by visiting Gt Metrix and entering your URL. It will give you a time, and as long as it’s under 5 seconds you’ll be OK.

How can you speed up your website?

Along with the load speed in seconds it will also give you a score out of 100 and give you the exact issues with your website.

You can then take the relevant steps to speed up your website. This may involve,

• Leverage browser caching
• Optimising images
• Enable gzip compression

If this sounds a bit too technical, we can help. We do offer a website speed up service if you’d like us to help. Feel free to contact us to arrange this.

11. A Formal Penalty

Not to confuse you but there is a difference between “having your website penalised” and “being hit with a penalty”. Up until this point we have only discussed issues that will cause Google to devalue your site. On occasion, Google may issue a formal penalty.

Getting your website hit by a penalty is rare. But if you have performed well in search results in the past but not anymore, this may be a sign that Google has taken action against your website.

The two most common ways to get your website penalised by Google are:

Over optimisation (on-page): This usually means you’ve tried to cram your keywords into every URL, Heading, Title tags, Alt Text, etc. This kind of tactic isn’t natural, and it doesn’t work anymore. Using the same keywords robotically throughout your website will raise a red flag with search engines.

Unnatural link building (off-page): Gaining links back to your website is important, but you have to do it the right way. Buying links, swapping links, poor-quality links and unnatural anchor text is another way to get your site penalised.

How to see if your website has been hit with a penalty?

Login to your Google Search Console account. Once you’ve selected your website from the list, you can use the menu on the left-hand side to navigate to:

Search Traffic > Manual Actions

Hopefully, it will say “No manual webspam actions found,” which means you have NOT been penalised.

How to recover from a penalty by Google

If you have suffered a penalty, it is NOT the end of the world, but it will require your immediate attention.

Google will inform you why they have penalised your website. Once you have fixed the particular issue, you can then submit a “reconsideration request” to Google. Google will then check to ensure you have corrected the issue. If everything is OK, they will remove the penalty.

In Summary

There are so many things you can do to improve your visibility in search results. Most of which can be done by you without the need of an SEO company. The more you understand about your website, the easier it will be if you do decide to hire someone later on in the process.

Over to you

Are YOU finding it difficult to climb onto the first page of Google? Now that you’ve read the article, do you feel a little clearer about what you need to do? If you’d like a step-by-step action plan to rank on the first page of Google then, check out our SEO Starter Pack below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post 11 Reasons You’re NOT Ranking in Google & How To Fix It appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

You might have a number of questions and concerns, but, without spending hours on the phone speaking to dozens of web designers, how will you know who to choose?

This is why I wrote this article.

I wanted to lay it all out on the table and show you our entire process from start to finish, so you know exactly what you get when you hire us.

Below, I’ll walk you through the 31 steps we use to create a high-performing website that works FOR you!

1. We talk, usually via Skype

Before we start working together, we’ll book in some time to have a chat about your project. We’ll usually do this on a live video call and discuss what you want to achieve from your new website.

We’ll take a look at your existing site (if you have one) and we’ll go through your ideas for the new site. We can use this time to talk about your goals and objectives so that we have a better understanding of how we can help.

Essentially, this call is to work out whether we are a right fit for each other. I work only with clients who I can truly help, which is why this call is important. We’ll also discuss your budget, and I can give you an indication of what we charge.

2. Questionnaire

Following on from our initial call, we will send you a website questionnaire to fill out. This will allow us to gather additional information so we know as much as possible about your business before we start designing and building it. The more information we have, the better the finished product.

3. We send you a quote

Once we have all your requirements, we will send you a full proposal for our services, including all the website features you requested. We may also include additional elements that we think would work well for your website. More often than not, the fee for our services is similar to the price we discussed on the call.

We can also include a quote for creating your website content. Most of our clients hire us to write the text for their new website. This is an option for you, too.

4. Research

Using the information you provided on the initial call and the questionnaire, we will begin our own research. We will do a deep dive into your world, learning as much as possible about your industry and your competitors. We’ll perform some keyword research to find out what your customers search for online. During this time we’ll look at dozens of different websites, leaving no stone unturned before moving forward with any designs.

5. Initial concepts

Once we have enough information from the research, we then move onto the planning stage. This is where the fun begins. This is the creative part that I personally love the most. We’ll start by sketching out some layouts on a whiteboard. We use a lot of post-it notes and marker pens to come up with a basic wireframe of your pages. This begins the initial framework of your new site.

We’ll also discuss the main colours we’ll be using and taking into account what you already have and what we would recommend. We’ll decide on the best use of fonts and where to place your headlines and content for the most impact. We’ll also decide where your calls to action will go and how to ensure they are clearly displayed for your users.

6. Mockup

The next stage of the process is to take all the rough sketches and post-it notes and turn them into a work of art. Your website. We use Adobe Photoshop to pull together all of the pieces from our planning to create a mockup. We’ll position each element one by one and add some content to bring it to life.

Everything from your logo to your social media icons will have its own rightful place. Every inch of the design will be considered, informed by the research and concepts we’ve previously completed. Some of the initial ideas won’t work when we add them to Photoshop. And that’s fine. At this stage, there will be a lot of testing and trial and error along the way.

Chances are the design will change numerous times throughout the mockup stage until we are happy. This is one of the most import steps, and we’ll keep working on it until we have something that looks spectacular, is user-friendly and ensures maximum results.

Here’s an example of us building a mockup

7. You see the design

This is the fun part for you. This is the first time you get to see the design since we’ve started working together.

Once we are happy with the mockup, we’ll send you the homepage design via a video link. In the video, we’ll walk you through the design and talk you through each element one by one. By using a video, you get to see the full design as if it were a real website. We’ll explain why we’ve designed it the way we have and you’ll get to experience it before we move forward with the rest of the project.

Please note

Some of the items on the mockup will act as placeholders. This means if we are waiting for images and text from you, we may use stock images temporarily until we have all the correct information. Currently, your mockup is still a static document; the extra content can be added later on in the process.

8. Feedback

Once you’ve watched the video and had chance to reflect on what you’ve seen you can tell us what you think. You can also ask us any questions, and we can discuss what you want to change, if anything. This is your opportunity to let us know if we’ve missed out any key information so we can add it before moving forward with the build.

9. Continue with designs

Once we have the homepage nailed down, we then design the layouts for your other pages. You will generally have 3 unique layouts to choose from for your website. A homepage, an inner page and a blog page. We’ll design the additional pages using Photoshop like we did before. The colours and style will match the homepage, but the structure will be different.

10. Domain name

When we are happy with the designs, we then move onto the technical aspects of the process. We will register your domain if you haven’t already done so. If you have already done this, then we will use a temporary domain, which we’ll work on while we’re building your site.

Please note

Even though we register (and purchase) the domain for you, you will own it. It will be registered in your name.

11. Hosting

Along with your domain name, we’ll also purchase hosting. This will allow us to install a coming soon page and set up your email accounts so you can use them while we’re building your website.

Please note

If you already have an existing site, this will already be set up for you.

12. Setup of emails

It’s time to register your email accounts. This is where you get to decide which emails you’d like to use. You can have as many as you like. A few popular choices are yourname@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com and enquiries@yourdomain.com.

13. Install WordPress

The very first thing we need to do before we build your website is to install WordPress. WordPress is the content management system we’ll be using for your site. It will allow you to make changes easily, so you don’t have to pay us every time you want to add something. If you want to know why we ONLY use WordPress, then this article will explain all.

14. Add coming soon page

Once we’ve installed WordPress, we will add a “coming soon” page. This means we can start working on your website and we don’t have to worry about your customer stumbling across a half-built website. Instead, they’ll be greeted with a nice, warm welcome in anticipation of your brand new site.

15. Install the Genesis Framework

We use something called “Genesis” to build your website. It’s a WordPress framework that allows us to have 100% control over the technical aspects of your website. It also allows us to take your truly bespoke design and turn it into a fully functional website without additional “drag and drop” software.

16. The techie bit – Photoshop to website

We then take the Photoshop files we created for your mockup and your other pages and add them to your website. To do this, we create page templates for each unique design using a number of fancy tools and techniques (Code editors, FTP, CSS and PHP).

This sounds complicated and confusing, and it often is. It can take a lot of trial and error and is probably the most time-consuming part of the project. It needs to be done properly otherwise the website won’t look like the initial design you fell in love with.

We also have to prepare the site for mobile devices. The website will need to look good no matter what device is used to view it. We’ll assign a specific layout for mobiles, tablets, laptops, etc,.

17. Add pages and assign templates

We will then create all of the pages for your website within WordPress. Usually, we’ll just add blank pages with the titles, to begin with.

If this is a redesign of an existing site, we’ll also need to make sure that the URLs for these pages are the same as the old site. This isn’t always possible, so we’ll need to be extremely careful setting up redirects as we don’t want any broken links when you launch your new website. More on this in step 25.

18. Choose page style

Once we have added your blank pages, we then need to choose how each page will look by selecting the relevant template which we created in step 16. Generally speaking, the homepage and the blog page will be unique, but most of the inner pages follow a very similar style.

19. Add menu items

We then add your menu items to their assigned position. This is where we choose which pages will appear within the main navigation area of your website and order them appropriately.

You may have more than one menu on your website (e.g., sidebar, header, footer, etc.) so we’ll need to be careful not to duplicate pages. We also need to keep in mind the end user and how they can navigate through the site easily.

20. Add content

Once we have added all the menu items to your website, we can then add the content. We take the text and images for each section of your site and place them on the correct page.

We will arrange your content in a way that makes it easy to consume. There’s nothing worse than blocks of text with nothing to break it up. We’ll use images and headings to make it as readable as possible.

21. Plugins

We then install any relevant plugins to your website. Plugins are like website add-ons, and we’ll use them for most of the advanced features on your site. There are over 45,000 plugins to choose from, another great reason to use WordPress. Things like image galleries, contact forms, and social media sharing buttons can all be added by using these pre-made applications.

We may also adapt the plugins to make them look more in keeping with the style of your website.

22. API integrations

Aside from using plugins, we may also need to integrate additional applications from third-party websites. Services like MailChimp and PayPal use APIs so they can communicate directly with your website. Think of them as plugins on steroids. They will make your life easier and most major companies make their software WordPress friendly.

23. Test contact forms

We’ll go through your website, testing all of the contact forms, ensuring that they work properly and that emails go to the right place.

We can edit the form so you can gain any relevant details you’ll need from your prospect. We can also add more email recipients, meaning multiple people can receive your enquiries.

24. 301 redirects

If this is a redesign of an existing site, we’ll need to ensure all of your old pages are correctly transferred over using 301 redirects as we said in step 17. On occasion, you may not want to keep the old pages, or you might want to change the URLs. That’s fine. But we will need to set up 301 redirects for each page you plan on changing.

Essentially, we’ll communicate with Google exactly what you’re changing, so it knows where to redirect traffic if users land on a specific page in the search results.

Take this example below:

Old URL: exsistingwebsite.com/about-us
New URL: exsistingwebsite.com/about

We’ll make sure that if your old URL is displayed on Google, the page will automatically redirect to the new one. So no lost traffic.

25. Mobile friendly test

We will then test your website on different sized screens to see how it looks. During the website build stage (step 16) we assigned a different layout depending on the size of the device e.g. iPhones, iPads, laptops and desktops. However, we’ll still need to check it to make sure looks OK now that we’ve added plugins.

26. Page load speed

We need to check one last thing before we feel comfortable releasing your website to the world. We want to test your page load speed to make sure the site is running as quickly as possible. Google advises that all websites should load within 5 seconds to avoid any kind of penalty.

We use a number of tools to confirm your new website is as quick as it can be and we might even install some additional features to improve it if it needs it. The quicker your website loads, the better the experience for your users.

27. Cross browser test

There are many different web browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer to name a few. Each browser will display your website slightly differently. There’s no real way to avoid this but we do make sure to catch any major differences and glitches.

28. Yoast SEO plugin

We will then install the Yoast SEO plugin to your website. This is the tool that will allow you to optimise your website so that search engines can find you more easily. We will set it up for you and use it to verify your website with Google in the next step.

29. Submit sitemap to Google Search Console

Using Yoast, we can connect your website directly to Google. This means they can provide you with extra data about your website, and send you an email if you have any errors going forward.

We then provide Google with a list of web pages from your site so they can start listing them in search results. This is known as your “sitemap”. Chances are they would find your site over time anyway but this way they will keep their records up to date every time you make a change to your site.

30. Google Analytics

Once we have given your site to Google, we can then create your visitor tracking account. Instead of using fancy plugins for this, we use Google Analytics. This is a free tool that Google provide to show you everything you need to know about your website visitors. This will show you everything from monthly visitor numbers to the most popular pages. It’s a very valuable tool which you want to keep an eye on.

31. Rank tracking

We’ll add your website to our rank tracking software and keep an eye on how well you perform. From the day we launch we’ll have a record of your Google rankings and keep track of how they adjust within a month of launching. The main reason we do this for you is to make sure there aren’t any technical issues affecting your website’s performance.

Summary

So there you have it, our entire web design process from start to finish. I didn’t want to focus on the technical aspects of what we do. Instead, I wanted to show you the broad outline so can see what’s involved when designing a website. Hopefully, I’ve answered a few questions along the way. But if you have anymore, feel free to comment below!

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post How we build your website from start to finish appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

But wait!

Before you run off and hire the first web designer you find, you might want to take a minute. Over the years I’ve reviewed hundreds of websites and had many conversations with customers who have been burnt in the past. There are quite a few mistakes people make when getting a website and I want to help you avoid the pitfalls as best I can.

1. The final design doesn’t look how you want it to.

This happens a lot. You pay for a new website, and you wait weeks or even months to see the final design before it goes live. It’s only then you find you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit within your style or branding.

This is a common issue. It’s too late to start the project again and trying to change it to something else entirely can take just as long. You’ve spent money, and you’re now stuck with a design you don’t like or want. It’s not your fault, you trusted a designer and their expertise.

We’ve heard this story plenty of times, and in most cases you’ll end up sticking with what you have. A lot of people end up resenting their website. Not much fun all-round.

Before committing to a project, ask your web designer how they will prevent this issue from happening. Will they show you a mockup or at least a wire frame of their proposed design before you invest too much money?

What we do to solve this problem.

At Jammy Digital, we don’t take a penny of your money until you know exactly what your website will look like. We design a mockup of your homepage before we send you an invoice. That way, we can talk about the design together and what you like/dislike about it before we build it.

If you decide you don’t like it, you can simply walk away. No harm done.

2. The website doesn’t appear in search results

Your website is live and has been for a few weeks. But there’s just one problem. You can’t find your website in search results. Maybe you’ve searched for your business name and you’re nowhere to be found on Google. Understandably, you’re a little concerned.

This can happen for a number of reasons, there might be a technical issue preventing it from being indexed by search engines. Your site might not have been released to Google or maybe there is an underlying issue with the website that’s causing search engines to ignore you.

What we do to solve this problem.

All of the websites we build appear highly in search results. This is because we use our extensive knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO) to plan and build your website.

The way your pages are laid out, the menu structure, the URLs all count towards a search engine friendly website. This means that you will already have a solid foundation to start with, even if you don’t hire an SEO company further down the road.

On the day your website goes live, we create an account with Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools). This is the system that communicates with Google and tells them that your website is live. We then give them a list of your website pages so they can start listing them in search results as soon as possible.

If there are any technical issues with your website, we will receive an alert directly from Google. That way we can address any issues immediately.

3. You don’t have access to update the website yourself

It always surprises me when business owners don’t have access to update their own website. I understand if you’d rather NOT do it yourself if you haven’t got the time or skills, but still, the choice should be yours.

These days you don’t need a web developer to make minor changes to your website. Most websites come with some kind of editing system which makes it very easy for you to change text and add images.

Your website will continue to change and evolve, and you will need to be able to update it when you want. You really don’t want to have to ask your web designer for every simple edit. Knowing how to make changes yourself will save you time and probably some money too.

What we do to solve this problem.

Every website we design is built using WordPress. WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that makes it very easy for you to make changes. Even if you’re a technophobe (like my dad).

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS and it’s used by some of the biggest companies in the world.

The main reason WE use WordPress is so you can update the site yourself whenever you like. We will also send you a training video on how to make changes. You will get to log into the backoffice of your website and edit things as you wish.

4. The website is difficult to use on mobile devices

Over the past couple of years, search engines have made it essential to have a mobile friendly website. This means if your site doesn’t work smoothly on mobile devices (smart phones & tablets) then you are less likely to appear in mobile search results.

Although your site may work on mobile devices, it may not be classed as responsive. This means that it’s more difficult to use than it should be.

To check if your website is “responsive” you can use Google’s very own mobile friendly test.

Some web designers treat this as an afterthought, so they don’t spend the time and effort to make an effective mobile design and opt for a “smaller version” instead.

Before you hire a web designer, tell them that site will need to be RESPONSIVE – no, you don’t want a “mobile version”, you don’t want the website to be just “accessible”, you need it to be responsive. You shouldn’t really have to ask as it should come as standard. But you’d be surprised by how often I see new websites that are terrible when you use them on a mobile device.

What we do to solve this problem.

We build responsive websites that pass the Google test every time. Simple. This means that you are more likely to appear higher up in mobile searches.

However, we go one step further. We build your website with a “50/50” mentality. This means that when we design your desktop site we are also considering how this will work on a mobile phone or an ipad.

Your site will not only work on smaller screens, it will be user-friendly and convert more visitors into enquiries.

5. Your traffic numbers are low and you don’t know why

This happens all the time. Your website is finally live and has been for a few weeks but when you check your visitor numbers you want to cry. Nothing but crickets.

Yes. It can take time to build up your numbers, but there are things you could be doing to speed the process along. You shouldn’t be waiting around, hoping that it will naturally increase by itself.

Ideally, you would have a strategy in place before you launch. Marketing is much more than clicking “go live” and shouting about it on social media, which is why having a plan as vital.

What we do to solve this problem.

When we take you on as a client we first spend some time understanding your business. We send you a questionnaire to fill out before we begin building your site so we can discover your goals, your target audience, your place in the market. This will help us develop a site that performs well from day one.

As well as this, we also include a free digital marketing strategy session which consists of a 1 hour Skype call to enable you to get off to the best possible start once you’ve launched. This is where we’ll discuss a plan of action to increase your visitor numbers and enquires as quickly as possible.

This might consist of things like:

• An email marketing strategy
• How to develop a content marketing plan
• How to use videos to reach more people

This will be a unique plan built around your business. We’ll only give you the advice that will work for you.

6. You don’t know how to track your visitors

So you have a new website which you love. There’s only one problem. How do you know if anyone is visiting it?

You should be able to check some statistics on how your website is performing. Things like:

• Visitor numbers
• Popular pages viewed
• How people found your website
• How people are accessing your site

These are basic stats that will allow you to measure your success and it’s important that you know where to find this information. In my experience, what gets measured gets improved.

What we do to solve this problem.

Every single website we build will have visitor tracking enabled. We will create a Google Analytics account and link it to your website so you can view your stats any time you like.

We will also send you a free training video on how to use Google Analytics, so you don’t have to scratch your head trying to work out how to use it.

7. Your pages take too long to load

If your website runs slowly, you might have a problem. Slow loading websites can be very frustrating for your visitors who won’t stick around if they have to wait.

Search engines care about their users and want to deliver the best possible experience. This means you have to keep your site running smoothly if you want the best possible rankings.

There are many reasons your site may take longer to load, such as:

• Images not optimised properly
• Bad web building software
• Low quality hosting
• Too many add-ons or plugins
• Unnecessary functionality and code.

All of these are contributing factors in slowing down your website.

You can check your page load speed for free using GT Metrix. It will measure your load speed in seconds and will also give you a performance grade out of 100.

What we do to solve this problem.

All our websites are built to be lightweight. This means we’ll keep the site updated and free of any excessive plugins and extravagant code that may slow the site down.

We’ll optimise your image sizes individually before we add them to the website so they are the smallest possible size without losing the quality.

We also use a high quality hosting company to keep your website running smoothly. Our hosts come with unlimited bandwidth, 20GB of disk space, 2GB Ram and 99.9% uptime.

Wow, that sounds geeky!

Essentially, it means our websites are speedier than a Gazelle, and yours should be too!

8. Your website isn’t generating any leads or sales

Getting traffic to your website is one thing, converting your visitors into enquiries is another. Your website should have one main purpose and that should be to generate its own leads and sales.

Here’s a list of things you might want from your website:

• More phone calls
• More email enquiries
• More call back requests
• More applicants
• More donations
• More prospects to build your database

Whatever your intent, if you haven’t thought about this before your website has been built then you may find it hard to convert your users.

What we do to solve this problem.

As part of our discovery session at the start of the process, we’ll find out what the overall purpose of the website is.

Before we even think about coding, we will know exactly what you need from your site, meaning we build it with your overall goal in mind. This will then inspire the whole design, including the layout, the colour scheme, menu structure, images, the headlines. Everything.

Before we begin building the site, we’ll design you a mockup of the homepage and record a video walkthrough explaining the different elements of the site. In this video we’ll show you how the design will persuade your visitors to do what you want them too .

Summary

Take your time to find the right web designer for you. Please don’t buy based on price alone. It’s almost always the wrong thing to do. The majority of the issues in this article can be avoided as long as you find someone who really understands your business goals and has the experience to advise you correctly.

Over to you…

Have you faced any of the problems listed above? Or have you encountered any other problems that gave you a headache. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Problems that occur when you get a new website… and how we prevent them appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Why use a 301 redirect?

1. Changed your company domain name

One of the main reasons you would use a 301 is because you have changed your business name. The likelihood is, you’ll need to change the domain name too.

Example

KFC used to be known as Kentucky Fried Chicken. When they changed their name to KFC, they needed to add a 301 redirect to their new domain name.

So now, when you visit kentuckyfriedchicken.com you will notice that page redirects to kfc.com. They are doing this with a 301 redirect.

If they didn’t have a 301 setup, then they would technically have two separate websites on two different domains, which can cause massive confusion to users and search engines.

Moved or deleted a page on your website

Another common reason for using a 301 is if you want to change the URL on one of your pages.

The reasons for doing this include; deleting pages, changing categories, changing menu items or amending anything to do with your overall website structure. Ordinarily, you would lose all of the link power going to the old URL but by using a 301 redirect search engines will allow you to keep most this power.

Example

Let’s just say you have an online shop, and you were changing a URL for one of your products to make it easier for search engines. *Hint the shorter the URL the better.

Old URL – myshop.com/products/mens/shoes/black-leather-shoes

Change to

New URL – myshop.com/mens/shoes/black-leather-shoes

The problem is that search engines still have a record of the old URL. That means that they will still continue to list it in search results for the some time and if you’ve changed the URL path, your user will probably land on a 404 error page which is bad, especially if you want to continue selling shoes. This is why you need to use a 301 redirect when you amend pages.

It will tell search engines that the old page is no longer available, and they need to send all the traffic to the new page.

Duplicate page content

Another reason you might need to use a 301 redirect is because of duplicate content issues.

Search engines need your content to be unique, and they may penalise you if you have too many pages on your website with similar content.

On the face of it, you might think your website is OK, but this issue is more common that you’d think. And it needs fixing asap.

You can check Google Webmaster tools for any duplicate pages or use a free online tool such as www.siteliner.com to see if any of your pages have this issue.

www. vs. non www. – Canonical URLs

This leads on nicely from the last section, but I delve deeper, I want to clarify what we mean by canonical URLs.

Another reason duplicate pages arise is because you haven’t chosen a preferred URL.

As you’re probably aware, some websites come with (www.) in front of the domain and others are seen as a “naked URL” without the (www.)

According to Google; there is no real SEO benefit to choosing one over the other, it’s personal preference. However, if you don’t pick one, it WILL affect your SEO.

Once you’ve decided, you will need to setup a 301 redirect to fix it.

How to add 301 redirects

Adding 301 redirects can be very simple, but it all depends on how your website was built. If you have access to your content management system, then you may be able to make changes without messing around with any code. WordPress is the most popular CMS, so I’ll walk you through the different steps below on how to set them up.

Simple 301 redirects with WordPress

If you use WordPress as your CMS, then you’re in luck. Just follow the simple instructions below and add the 301 redirects via your dashboard.

Step 1. Once you’ve logged into the WordPress dashboard, hover your mouse over the plugins tab on the left and click ‘add new’ from the drop-down menu.

Step 2. Using the search bar on the top left of the screen, search for “simple 301 redirect” and press enter.

Step 3. Install the plugin and click “Activate Plugin” on the next page.

Step 4. Hover you mouse over the settings tab, and you will see “301 redirect” on the drop down menu. Click to open.

Step 5. Using the plugin, you can assign which pages you want to redirect and where you want to redirect them to.

Step 6. Click Save Changes, and you’re done.

Setting up 301 redirects without WordPress

If your website is not built using WordPress or any other CMS, then you will need to add the code manually or send the information to you web developer.

Step 1. Head over to this website https://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.htm

Step 2. Enter the URL for your old page and your new page.

Step 3. Select the type of redirect, in other words, how do you want to add the code to your website.

Step 4. Select generate code and then paste that code onto your website.

There are many different ways to add 301 redirects to your website, and hopefully, this post should make things a lot easier in the future.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post What is a 301 redirect and why should you care? appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Before you focus on external link building or creating a great content marketing strategy, you need to ensure that your on-page SEO is in tip-top condition.

On-page SEO – 3 Top Tips for SEO Success

Martin, Jammy’s founder, talks in his video about the top three things you need to get right in order to improve your on-site SEO. Making your website look great is important.

The functionality, the call to action, the brand, colours, copy, images etc. all make a website – but what is the use of a good-looking website if someone can’t find it?

When you complete your website any good web designer will release it to the search engines and it’s crucial that your on-site SEO is as perfect as it can be at this stage.

Top Three Things You Can Do…

1. Optimise your page titles/meta descriptions

This, in our opinion, is the single most important aspect to on page SEO. You’re telling Google exactly what each page of your website is about – you’re essentially giving it a title.

What we would recommend is including your targeted keywords in the title tags.

Title tags and meta descriptions are easy to spot in search results and you can clearly see what the company is promoting.

2. Include 400 words of text on each page

We know, we know. Sometimes copy isn’t the most exciting of things. But Google needs to understand what your page is about, so you need to tell it.

By including text on your website you’re showing Google what product or service you offer. If you include your keywords within your text (naturally, not by stuffing them in!) then even better.

If you’re worried about your page being too text heavy, then use little boxes at the side or different functionality within your website to break it up.

3. Optimise your images

A particularly important tip for those who run an online shop.

Often, shops find they get a lot of traffic from Google images, so it’s really worth taking the time to name your photo properly and include your keywords. It’s also worth doing this with the alt text.

And that’s it. If you have any questions at all, just comment in the box below.

We’ll have another video for you very soon!

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post 3 Top Tips For On-Page SEO appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of gaining higher rankings for certain targeted keywords.

SEO is not magic, it’s a well thought out, tried-and-tested method of essentially, giving Google exactly what they want, so they prioritise your site over your competitors.

Remember, the organic search results are listed just below the Google’s Ad results. It’s clear what a Google ad as it says the word ‘Ad’ next to the listing – web users have become savvy to this and often ignore these results.

Why is SEO so important for businesses?

Some facts…

Did you know that 70% of people click organic search results as opposed to paid ads?

Did you know that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine?

And did you know that 75% of people never scroll past the first page of Google?

Some pretty impressive statics and as you can see, it’s very hard to argue against the benefits of SEO, but some business owners do ask, what does all this mean?

How can SEO help you?

Well, it’s quite simple, the more relevant web visitors you gain to your site the larger your profits. Ultimately, SEO is a powerful, complex and rewarding lead generating activity.

Everyday someone searches for YOUR products and services online and, providing your website is easy-to-navigate with a clear call to action, you could easily see a massive increase in leads and sales.

If you want to find out how we can help you increase your visibility online get in touch today for a free consultation.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post What is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation Explained appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.