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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

Q2 – How accessible are your contact details?

Q3 – How does your logo look on your website?

Q4 – Do you have a strong call to action?

Q5 – How would you describe your use of images?

Q6 – Are you clear about what services you offer?

Q7 – How much content do you have?

Q8 – Is your website customer focused?

Q9 – Do you use jargon on your website?

Q10 – Do you capture your customer’s email address?

Q11 – How useful is your blog?

Q12 – How would you describe your menu/navigation?

Q13 – How would you describe your use of colours?

Q14 – How readable is your content?

Q15 – How would you describe your choice of fonts?

Q16 – How do you use internal links to your advantage?

Q17 – How quickly does your website load?

(Note. You can check your page load speed using GT Metrix)

Q18 – Is your website mobile friendly?

(Note. You can check if your website is responsive by using the mobile friendly tool)

Q19 – Do you use a variety of media throughout your website?

E.g. video and audio podcasts

Q20 – How do you use social media within your website?

Q21 – Do you use testimonials on your website?

Q22 – Do you use case studies on your website?

Q23 – How unique is your content?

Q24 – Do you use added software on your website?

E.g. drag and drop software that may slow your website down.

Q25 – How many content web pages do you have?

*Not including shopping pages.

Q26 – Does the personality of your business shine through?

Q27 – Do you show your staff/team on your website?

Q28 – Do you answer customer questions?

Q29 – Does your website look cluttered?

Q30 – Do you discuss cost or pricing on your website?

What score did you get? Comment below!

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.

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.

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.