Stacy Fisher Gunn of www.livingupp.com is in the Hotseat today for Episode 3 of Website Smackdown where we review one website to showcase what’s working and where they may be loosing money on their site.
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Website Smackdown Episode TWO…
I reviewed One Smart Cookie’s online presence to see if they are missing opportunities for more leads and clients on their website. I did a live screencast audit of this website to show you what they are doing well and where there may be some holes that are leaking money.
Find out if you suffer from similar marketing mistakes and how we can fix them. Want to have your website reviewed with a fresh set of eyes by a 25 year Marketing and Digital Design veteran? Post your link in the comments below for a chance to be featured and showcased to help you improve your online success system.
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Ultimately, your prospects want to know about what you offer and how it can help them… so tell ‘em!
The Home page of your website is just that… it’s “home”. Most of the time, it’s where you drive your website visitor traffic from paid social media ads, organic posts, e-mail series, printed marketing collateral, and even from your business card! That’s why we made such a big deal about the curbside appeal of your Home page in a previous blog post.
Next, we gave you a big blog post about your About page and what it should really be about… and it’s not just about you!
Now, it’s time to hit another highly visited page on your website… the Services page (can also be known as a Product page).
Before we get into specifics, let’s step back in time just a little. Remember when people went door-to-door selling everything from encyclopedias to kitchen gadgets? Well, that salesperson probably didn’t bring their entire line of products with them to the neighborhood, nor did they just sit in someone’s living room and tell about all the cool stuff their company sold.
Nope, they brought a few of their best shiny objects to show off and then opened a beautiful catalog with pictures, descriptions, prices, and a big, long order form.
Though your entire website is your “catalog”, your Services page is where you show off and describe your shiny objects — what you actually sell.
If your website pages are doing what they’re supposed to do, your site visitors have checked you out, know a little about you, and are ready to discover more about the products and services you offer. They want to see the different packages or options and possibly some pricing info if you choose to include that.
Your Services page takes the concepts, promises, and stories you’ve been sharing with your prospects and brings it down to the details of what THEY can choose from when they CHOOSE to do business with you! Even if you only offer customized services, spell that out on your Services page so the reader can begin to visualize themselves deciding, purchasing, and working with you.
Let’s make this a two-way conversation! Contact us and let’s talk more about creating your “catalog” and making it irresistible to your ideal customers and clients.
The post Great Websites: Part 3 – The Services Page appeared first on Fingerprint Marketing.
Watch me take on Acute Injury Care’s online presence to see if they are missing opportunities for more leads and clients on their website: http://www.acuteinjurycare.com/
I’ll do a live screencast audit of this website to show you what they are doing well and where there may be some holes that are leaking money. Find out if you suffer from similar marketing mistakes and how we can fix them.
Want to have your website reviewed with a fresh set of eyes by a 25 year Marketing and Digital Design veteran? Post your link in the comments below for a chance to be featured and showcased to help you improve your online success system.
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Make these three small changes to your website to help you gain an advantage over your competitors.
Watch the replay right here or on our Facebook page and comment with your questions!
The post 3 Website Tips to Eclipse Your Competition appeared first on Fingerprint Marketing.
Is your business ready to take full advantage of Voice Search? If not, it’s well past time for you to catch up, because Voice Search has been blowing past text searches for almost four years now! Back in 2014, a groundbreaking study by Thrive Analytics concluded that use of Personal Assistants like Apple’s Siri had doubled over the previous 12 months. This rise in use could be seen in all age demographics, with the largest in the ever-important 18 – 29 and 30 – 43 age ranges. And that was all three years ago! Today, with Cortana, Google Home and Amazon Echo now in the mix for consumers, voice searching has grown exponentially–56% of adults now use Siri, Google Now, or Cortana. This means that every business needs to maximize its ability to take advantage of voice searching in order to stay competitive. Voice-activated technology is changing how your clients find you online.
So let’s get you on board this fast-moving information train, shall we?
First, let’s make clear how voice searching differs from text searching. Believe it or not, voice searching does have distinctive differences from the basic text searches that we’ve all lost precious hours over the years typing into our favorite search engines, hoping we somehow find the results we need. We could get very technical about it all, but others have done that for us already. In short, voice searching leads to more precise and complete results because it uses more precise and complete language.
As a general rule, we speak differently than we write. This is especially true when it comes to voice vs. text searching. Say we want to find a place for excellent seafood in Seattle (and there are many choices there!). A text search into Google or some other search engine will most likely be best seafood restaurants Seattle. But using Siri or Cortana on our phones to state a more natural and complete sentence like, What is the best seafood restaurant in Seattle, will get us better results than the basic text search.
Here are three easy changes to make to your website that will help you take advantage of the current voice search revolution (and its continued evolution):.
Write website copy with natural language speech in mind. Again, when someone types a search, they use computer language — “Seattle Lunch Deals,” for example. A voice search says “Which Seattle restaurants have the best deals for lunch?” So, make sure that in your website copy you include sentences that will match up with such spoken searches. For example, using the above spoken search sentence, have copy in your website that says things like, “if you are looking for the Seattle restaurant with the best deals for lunch, look no further than us!”
This greatly increases the possibility that your business will appear much higher on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) than it would with just a basic text search. It is well known that businesses that appear on the first SERP get much more business than those who appear on later pages. After all, we use searches to find answers quickly, so it makes sense that the first answers found will get more attention and be more likely to be used.
Try adding some relevant question keyword phrases to your keyword list, again keeping full sentences that sound natural verbally. Let’s use the generic “Joe’s Diner” for example (no offense to the real Joe’s Diners out there!):
What time does Joe’s Diner open?
Does Joe’s Diner have parking?
Does Joe’s Diner serve seafood?
Does Joe’s Diner have any lunch specials?
These full phrases, not just the obvious keywords like “open” or “parking” or “lunch specials,” will match up well with copy that says things like “we have parking available behind our building,” or “we serve seafood that will bring you back again and again.”
Write your web copy and blog posts with buyer intent in mind. If I searched for “dishwasher,” you’d have no idea whether I wanted to buy one, have one repaired, or was simply looking for images of dishwashers. In this example, we don’t know if the person searching wants to buy or is just doing research. The best way to use keywords to capture those who are looking to buy is to find ways to use what can be called “intent words” into your copy. What are “intent words?” These are ones that tell us what searchers want:
“Where” (as in “where can I find the best dishwasher?”)
“When” (“when does Joe’s Diner open on Sundays?”)
“How” (“How can I get a dishwasher delivered?”)
“What / Who” (“What store sells the best dishwashers” / “Who sells the best dishwashers”)
These are all simple and quick fixes that can help lead to significant boosts in business and in visibility (which go hand-in-hand, don’t they?). Make these changes in your website copy and all you’ll have to do is keep providing the excellent service you already do and watch your business flourish!
Good luck and good (word) hunting!
The post Is Your Business Ready for Voice Search? Make It So! appeared first on Fingerprint Marketing.
When you decided to up your game by investing in a professional website that actually works for you, brings in more business (cha-ching!), and that you’re proud to show off, you made one of the most important business decisions you’ll ever make.
Now don’t blow it by using a cheap hosting service!
We could end this blog post right here because that’s the bottom line, but give us just a few more paragraphs and we’ll make our case.
It’s really easy to get sucked in with low, or even free, monthly hosting rates but, just like cheap shoes, you’re gonna get what you pay for: Low quality and no support.
Don’t Make it a Great Day for Hackers!
Worst of all, your website will not be secure. Everything you just did (and paid for) to upgrade your virtual space is at risk of security breaches. Trust us when we say that you don’t want to wake up to the nightmare that your site has been hacked by hackers who do nothing but sit around and hack websites that are easy to hack. Those haters love sites that make their “jobs” easy and you don’t want to be on their list of favorites.
Downtime = Lost Money
Though it goes without saying, we’re gonna say it… You have better things to do than try to get your website back up after a takedown. Not only is this a waste of your time and energy, you are losing money every single minute that your prospects and customers can’t find you or do business with you online.
Then there’s this: If, and only if, your cheap-o hosting company provides great customer support AND they do very frequent backups of your site AND restoring everything is part of your monthly plan, getting you up and running may only take a few hours… or days. Could be longer. Maybe not ever.
Need a couple of aspirin yet?
The Weakest Link
Hosting can come cheap because the hosting company crams as many websites as possible on one server. You’re in shared space. Your website might be the biggest, baddest, deluxe model on the server, but if there’s even one econo-site on that same server that doesn’t employ good security tactics, everyone else is at risk.
Your site is only as secure as the weakest site on the server. You have no control.
Let’s face it, you’re just another customer to that hosting company. They didn’t invest their time and talent in you and your business by designing, building, and implementing your new website. And you’re only paying them a teeny-weenie amount of money each month so why in the world would they go out of their way to make sure your site is secure and that your business keeps running smoothly? (We’ll stop beating around the bush… they don’t care!)
Struggling with how to stand out and market your business to crush your competition? Let’s make a plan.
See, when you become (or became!) a client of Fingerprint Marketing, we invest in you just like you invest in us. We get to know you and will work with you to build and launch a website and marketing plan that will help your business grow to be profitable and sustainable.
Our bottom line: We care.
We care about you, we care about your business, and we care about the safety and security of your website because, really, they’re all kind of wrapped up in one another, aren’t they?
When we partner with companies like yours to take your online presence up a few (hundred) notches, we’ll ask you to commit to a minimum of 12 months of web maintenance that includes hosting with a premium hosting company. We know that 12 months may be a longer-term relationship than you’re used to but it’s how we roll. (Hey, it’s not like we’re asking for a big, fat diamond ring on the first date!)
Remember, you make an investment when you hire us, so part of your return on that investment is allowing us to ensure your site is always secure, updated, and isn’t getting hacked by those bleepin’ hackers!
Picture This…
You’re sound asleep and, when you wake up, you’re leaving on that well-deserved vacation you’ve been planning for months.
Oh, but no… you wake up to a hacked website. You can’t go on vacation now because you’re in recovery and restoration mode. You call your cheap-o hosting company only to find out that your cheap-o package doesn’t include restoring your site… that’s a separate fee and you haven’t been paying it. But wait… for today only, they’ll see what they can do for the low price of just $(insert the price of your vacation here)!
We don’t say this to scare you (okay, we wanna scare you just a little), but the extra few bucks you’ll spend on quality hosting each month is a nothing compared to the headache of trying to get your low-cost hosting company to get your site back up, running, and safely secured after a hack. There is no dollar amount that can be attached to the stress, strain, and a missed vacation!
Take Our Advice
If you’re going to subscribe to a hosting service, find out everything you can and don’t just look at the monthly price:
We get it, you have to save a little dough wherever you can, but website hosting is NOT the place to cut corners.
Our advice? Don’t go cheap on hosting services.
And don’t tolerate cheap shoes, you’re worth so much more than that!
Chat with us — we’d love to talk more about your website security… Really. We love this stuff.
The post How Cheap Shoes and Bad Hosting are Sucking the Life Out of Your Business appeared first on Fingerprint Marketing.
