OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE STRATEGY FOR 2019
Revitalize Your Website
Add more graphics, visuals, and audio information to your pages, including blogs to optimize your website strategy. The old “one picture is worth 1000 words” concept can work with many businesses. Show a gallery of quality photos on your landing and pillar pages and in blogs. This can include the interior of your store or restaurant, the products you sell, or people making use of your services.
Colorful graphs and charts are also helpful for certain blogs. Your landing page or blog can feature a link to a short video that shows how to complete a task or how your company works with clients.
Speed is important as well. You want quick access to your website and all of its pages. People viewing your site do not want to wait while web pages load.
Be Interactive
You may be able to offer interactive content such as a handbook or information that can be downloaded and stored at the end of a blog to optimize your website strategy. This is an opportunity to build an email list and more customer contacts.
A blog that offers a poll directly or through a link is another way to interact and generate feedback. You can ask people about their preferences or how they feel about a certain product or service. Keep it short and always tell people how much you value their response.
Do not be afraid to ask customers for feedback. This is another form of interaction. Link a short questionnaire to your blog or send customers an email asking them to review your service or product. Many businesses now do this and sometimes people can feel inundated with requests for surveys. Thank them in advance for their time and for their help to improve your product or service.
Be proactive and reach out to people who may have a complaint. Leveraging social listening may also help users feel like their concerns are being heard. Of course, thank your users for their interest and explain that you will take their criticism or suggestions into consideration. This is a good way to improve your relationship with customers.
Citation Sites
Citation sites are some of the easiest links to obtain and should be a starting point for any local SEO strategy. This is especially important if you’re a local business. After all, if you’re not being found in the city your business is located in, you’re missing out on some potentially low-hanging fruit.
There are a lot of platforms that can help audit your local listings. No matter which one you choose, or if you prefer to use a simple spreadsheet, keeping track of your listings is extremely important. A few examples of platforms to manage you listings include Moz Local, Synup, Whitespark, and Yext.
Be sure to set up the following duration sites, as they act like cornerstones for any local SEO strategy:
- Google my business
- Facebook business page
- Bing places
- Yelp
- Foursquare
- YP
It’s important to note a few things when claiming your citations:
- Be sure to have your name, address, and phone number (NAP) available to copy and paste. You may also want to jot down your business hours, accepted forms of payment, and both a short description (140 characters) and long description (500+ characters) about your business. You can use notepad or another standard text editor. This will make it much easier to ensure your listings are consistent and free of typos.
- Be sure to keep track of which citations you’ve completed and which ones are pending. A spreadsheet is typically the tool of choice here.
- Make sure you list your business in the proper category. This may seem obvious, but you may be surprised at how many businesses indirectly sabotage their own local SEO by incorrectly listing their information.
- Google will never call you unless you initiate the call. Anyone claiming to be from Google that is calling out of the blue is a scammer.
- You will get calls almost immediately from certain citation sites asking you to start advertising services with them. Sorry, but this is one of the worst parts of local SEO. Unless you’re planning on using pay per click advertising to dovetail with any local SEO strategy, it’s okay to just tell them you’re not interested at this time.
Asking for Reviews
While some sites, like Yelp, frown on requesting reviews, reviews are an important part of building credibility and creating social proof within a local market. Remind your website visitors that you are on these lists and include links when applicable.
If you have access to your website code, you can also add badges, like your rating from the BBB or other industry-related sites. These badges can be thought of as “credibility builders.”
As a general rule of thumb, try to get 1-2 new reviews per month. If you get more, that’s great. Just remember: consistency is key.
Learn More About Website Strategy in 2019
The largest search engine on the web changes their SEO requirements on a regular basis with their special analytics program for keywords and phrases in blogs and other content. (For a video on how SEO may be changing in 2019, click here.) Navigating through Google’s algorithm factors to achieve a top rating and their GMB program requires the skill of a professional web development service.
To learn more about SEO in 2019, check out this article from Search Engine Land.
Contact us at Red Rocket Web Specialists in Fort Collins to discuss improving your marketing strategy for 2019. We can help your business boost marketing outreach and bring more traffic to your website.