If you are having a difficult time getting conversions from your website then it may be beneficial to consider different ways that you can increase internet traffic. Your website conversion rate is made up of the total number of conversions that your website has received divided by the number of people that visited your website. Therefore, increasing your internet traffic, which is the number of people that visit your website, will help you get better conversions.

Create Great Content

One of the best ways to increase internet traffic for your website is by creating great content. Content is what web users interact with on your website. By creating quality content, you are giving your website more things that users can look at and use. Examples of content that you can add to your website include:

Blog posts
Videos
Podcasts
Photos

Regular content also alerts the search engines that your website is up-to-date, meaning that your website will rank better. A better ranking website will show up better to web users, naturally increasing your internet traffic.

Conduct Keyword Research

Another important tool for increasing website traffic is keyword research. Keyword research is the use of certain words and phrases in your content that website users look up on search engines that pertain to your website or business. The keywords and phrases that you want to include in your website are words and phrases that are commonly searched by your target market on different search engines. Having content that includes keywords makes it much easier for people to find your website and also increases the length of web viewer sessions on your website.

Be Present On Different Platforms

One of the best ways to increase your website’s internet traffic is to be visible and available to your customers and potential customers. A great way to become visible to your customers is to be active on different social media platforms. When you are frequently updating your information and providing content to your customers, you increase the amount of things that your customers can interact with and you make your website more available to them.

Use Advertising Tools

There are many opportunities to increase internet traffic for your business and website through marketing and advertising. This can include using paid search and display ads online. It costs money to use these advertising tools, but ads are also very effective in helping create traffic for your website. It is vital that you make sure that you have a goal in mind when using advertising tools in order to create a proper budget and to keep your website on track. If you do not have goals it can be easy to lose focus of what you are trying to do as well as to spend more money than you have to.

Do You Want To Increase Internet Traffic?

If these tips for increasing your website traffic have been helpful to you, we at Performance Driven Marketing might have services that would be useful for your website. We not only provide information to our clients about how to increase internet traffic, but we will also implement systems for you that will help you increase, track, and maintain traffic and your website as a whole. If you have any questions regarding our services or are looking for more ways for increase your internet traffic, please reach out to us today.

If you’re dipping your toes into the world of marketing to launch and better promote your brand and your business, you’ve probably heard the term “SEO” bandied about. SEO is one of the key fundamentals of online marketing, so if you want to grow your business, implementing the current SEO strategies is one of the best ways to do so. Here, we’ve broken down some of the basics of SEO to get you started on your journey.

What Is SEO?

SEO is short for “search engine optimization”. This refers to the process of optimizing your website to rank better on search engines, such as Google. When people search for a keyword, such as ‘low back pain from shoveling snow’, by utilizing SEO practices, you can get your page or article about that to show up in the first few pages of Google search results. At its core, SEO is how you increase the visibility of your website.

SEO isn’t purely about optimizing your website, though. It also involves other aspects of digital marketing, from the user experience, to web development, to the design of the content, to your branding, to content marketing, and much, much more. Thus, in order to have a high-ranking site in the search engines, you need to have excellent digital marketing practices as a whole, in addition to SEO expertise.

How Google Ranks Content

Google ranks your content in multiple ways, and to be successful at SEO, you’ll need to understand how this works. In order to rank well, you’ll need high-quality, original, and relevant information on your site’s pages that relate to what the searcher looked up. Google determines how relevant your content is through having “crawlers” evaluate it based on the keywords (like ‘low back pain’) within the page and whether or not the majority of the page’s content is just copy and pasted from another site or if it’s something quality and new.

Quality is also determined by how many sites link to your own, and the quality of those sites. If a reputable website links to yours, this will tell Google that your content is high quality and relevant. If a little personal blog that no other site has linked to links to yours, this won’t help your rankings. You’ll want links within your content too, to prove it can be trusted. These include .govs, .edus, and .orgs.

How long people stay on your site will also inform Google how relevant it is to the search result, as will how quickly your site loads and whether or not it is mobile friendly. The way Google ranks content is ever-changing, though, so in order to maintain a high-ranking in search results, you’ll need to stay on top of new and emerging tactics.

How To Build Your SEO Strategy

There are several key steps that you can take to build an effective SEO strategy. They are as follows:

Create your list of keywords
Study Google’s first page – what are the highest ranking results doing?
Create something new, better, and/or different from what’s already out there
Add a hook, which is why people link to specific types of content
Optimize your on-page SEO (keywords, internal, and external links)
Optimize for searchers (make sure it matches search intent)
Up your content design with pictures, graphics, charts, banners, and more, so it’s more interesting to look at and easier to read and understand
Audit your site
Be continuously improving and updating your content to meet current SEO standards

Keeping Up With Changing SEO Standards

Something that frustrates even the professionals is how SEO is an ever-changing practice that you need to stay on top of in order to continue seeing good results. What got your site to the first page of Google searches years ago will make it practically invisible now. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms which means that you need to be learning constantly and stay on top of all the latest changes. SEO is complex enough already, the last thing you need is to complicate it even more through utilizing strategies that no longer work. Staying informed will help you know what tactics to add to your strategy and what to toss.

Keeping up with changing SEO standards can feel like a never-ending race because it is. In order to stay ahead of the rest of the pack, you’ll need to both understand and keep track of: up and coming trends, new features in search tools and products, your audience, and the latest technological advances. Luckily, there are professionals who can help you out.

Do You Need Help With SEO?

Performance Driven Marketing has SEO experts in house who can help you increase the visibility of your website and generate more organic traffic. We want to help you get more customers and garner a stronger online presence. In addition to our professional SEO services, we can help you with web development, graphic design, and more. Contact us today to learn how we can help you grow your business.

When it comes to your business, it’s virtually impossible to achieve success without a good internet presence. Having a sleek logo and a beautiful website will draw people to you, but you also need high quality content in order to make them stay. A beautiful website can only do so much if your content writing is subpar. Having well-written content is essential for growing your business online.

While it may seem as though content writing is something anyone can do, there’s a reason why so many businesses outsource their content writing to professionals. Here’s what you need to know about how professional content writing helps businesses.

#1. Save Time

If you’re not already familiar with how to write content for a website and content that both Google and potential clients will approve of, you’ll greatly benefit from hiring a professional content writer. Rather than spending valuable time trying to learn, having professionals do the content writing for you will help save you time. Even if you do know how to write content for websites, chances are, if you’re starting a business, there’s a lot on your plate. Outsourcing will allow you to focus on other aspects of your business and ensuring customer satisfaction.

#2. Improve Readership

Too often, you’ll find websites with very minimal content. While this can work in some cases, in most, people want to actually learn about what it is you offer and what services you can provide. If they don’t find that, they’ll click away. Professional writers know how to write about what you do in a way that matches your business’s personality and answers your customers’ questions.

When you use content writers for your business, you’ll be able to have website content that isn’t just merely readable, but actually informative and written in a way for people to want to share it and come back to your website to learn more. Content writing helps businesses by boosting their website content’s readership with content that people want to read and learn more from.

#3. Increase Google Ranking

Even if you are a fantastic writer, that doesn’t necessarily mean your website content will rank well on Google search results. This is because content writing isn’t just about writing itself, it’s also about optimizing for SEO and integrating keywords in a natural way. Content writers know how to create engaging content that also ranks well, improving your business’s Google ranking. You don’t want a beautifully written article that research went into to go unseen. Content writers utilize their knowledge of Google and SEO to boost your viewership, so that the content on your website will get read.

For example, did you know that Google penalizes copied content or content that isn’t up to its standards? It’s true. Fresh, original content that has images, an appropriate amount of internal and external links and keyword usage, and meets word count requirements does better because it shows Google that your content writing is relevant, and thus, Google ranks your website higher in search engine results. Content writing helps businesses a lot through working with current and ever-changing SEO standards and strategies to make sure you get seen.

#4. Create A Brand Voice

You know when you click onto a site and can immediately get a sense of what working with that business would probably be like? Content writing plays a big role in this. Some people like their website content to be both fun and professional, so you might have some sass sprinkled into the cold hard facts. Others want a more chatty tone, while others prefer to stick with a professional voice.

Content writers can work to match the voice of your existing content or with you in order to come up with one that is right for you, your business, and your targeted audience. It’s important in content writing to consider both the business and the target audience, because that affects the tone of your writing. Content writing helps businesses by creating a brand voice for your company that suits it and its goals.

#5. Bring Life To Your Site

Standards of what makes a website good are constantly changing. What looked good a decade ago looks terrible now. It’s important to stay on top of the ever-changing trends. Content writing is no exception. Your content should be informative, engaging, and optimized, but not bulky or sparse. Websites that have a good amount of content and blogs that are written to standard will garner more traffic, because people will want to stay on your site to click around and learn more.

Are You Ready To Help Your Business?

Performance Driven Marketing understands the impact content can have on a business. We have several professional content writers in house who can make your website come alive with your voice and lure potential customers in. Let us be your solution for your writing needs. Contact us today to learn more about how content writing helps businesses, or about any of our other marketing services.

Google is constantly rolling out updates to their SEO algorithms. One consistent way that you might have heard in order to maintain SEO success in the long run is through utilizing the E-A-T principle. E-A-T is fairly divisive in the SEO community. There are those who say it’s an SEO fundamental, and then there are those who say it really doesn’t matter for your rankings at all. Let’s take a look into what E-A-T does and what Google has to say about whether or not it really matters for the SEO rankings of your website.

What Is E-A-T?

Sometimes known as page quality, E-A-T is what Google says that every page needs in order to be high quality, and is what human evaluators use in order to determine how relevant a page is to the search results for its keywords. Basically, E-A-T is what Google uses in order to determine just how legitimate the information on your site is, by ensuring that all of the content on it is made with expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

It mostly applies to websites that fall into the “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) category, aka “future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety,” as Google defines it. So essentially, sites that are medical, legal, financial, that give advice about important topics, and likely sites that sell products. If people need to be able to trust you and know that the information on your site matches what your site is about, you need to ensure you take E-A-T into consideration in order to be a high-quality site. After all, you wouldn’t trust information about medications on a clothing site, would you?

How Is E-A-T Evaluated?

While expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness may sound like interchangeable terms, the differences are important.

E = Expertise

Expertise means that you have a high level of knowledge and skill in a certain field, that you are an expert in it. When people search for content with expertise, they’re looking for content that was made by an expert in that field. For some websites, this is more important than others. For example, when it comes to the medical, legal, or financial fields, you’ll want that information to come from a certified professional. Some websites are able to have their content written by someone who is not an expert in the field, so long as it is approved and verified to be true and accurate by someone who is.

In some cases, expertise isn’t defined by the amount of formal education that someone has had in a field, but rather their life experiences. One such instance of this would be someone writing about what it’s like to live with a disease, or someone writing about something that they have a lot of experience with, which isn’t in the medical, legal, or financial fields.

A = Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness refers to your reputation and how likely people are to use you as a source of information. You may claim that you are an expert in your field, but Google needs to be able to back this up. It does this by looking to see your rating, how often people go to you for information, how trustworthy said information it is, and making sure that it’s not just you claiming you have authority on a certain topic, but that other people agree with that statement and utilize you as a source of information. For example, if exterior authoritative sites link out to yours, this tells Google that you’re a reputable source of information, and they’ll rank your site higher.

T = Trustworthiness

This refers to just how trustworthy your entire website is from who is writing the content to the content itself to the site as a whole. You want your site to be legit, accurate, and transparent. You need your information to be fact-based, not opinion-based, and to cite other established trustworthy sites within your content. Linking out to a .gov or .org or brand site is a great way to do this. If you mention dental work, linking to the ADA (American Dental Association) tells people that they can trust what you said.

Is E-A-T Actually Important?

It is important, especially when it comes to information that impacts people’s lives. You want your content to be accurate and true to avoid misleading people and resulting in real-life consequences. While E-A-T isn’t something that can be directly measured, like say, how many times keywords pop up in your website content, it is utilized to promote high quality, original content.

If you’ve worked in SEO, chances are that you’ve heard the phrase: “Content is king.” This means that creating high quality content is essential in order for your website to rank better, as if your site just repeats what others say, if it has information that doesn’t match what the site is about, if it isn’t trustworthy and people don’t go to you for information, your website won’t rank well. E-A-T is a guideline that gives insight into what high quality content means.

So, while E-A-T isn’t something that can be directly measured, it can impact your SEO ranking. E-A-T provides SEO professionals with a way to inform their content making process in order to ensure that the content they make is high quality that people will be able to turn to and trust, and ergo can potentially boost your SEO rankings.

Do You Need Help With High Quality Content For SEO?

Performance Driven Marketing makes a point of crafting beautiful websites with top quality content. We use CopyScape in order to ensure that the content we make is original, and know how to optimize your content for SEO. We value transparency, honesty, and legitimacy. If you need help with the content or SEO ranking of your website, we offer professional SEO and content writing services. Contact us today to learn more!

A sitemap is as it sounds: a map of your website. It both helps with the general navigation and appearance of your website, but also with your SEO rankings. While you do not technically need to have a sitemap for a website, they certainly make your site more user-friendly and easier for search engine bots to find and index. Here’s what you need to know about the functionality of sitemaps for the user experience and for SEO.

In Regards To The User Experience

Sitemaps help with the theme, navigation, and organization of your website. This instantly makes your site look more put together and easily understandable and accessible than a site without a sitemap would be.

Navigation.

Since sitemaps are literally a map of your site, they have links to everything on it, which makes navigation easier. People do not have the patience to figure out a site that is not clear and well-organized. Utilizing a sitemap will help users both instantly understand what your site is about and how to navigate it.

Organization.

They also help with organization, by having everything on your site neatly filed away. This both assists with the theme and navigation of your site as mentioned above and with whenever you need to add or rearrange your site. It’s easier to add sections or content to a site where you can already see what is on it and how it is laid out.

If you want a user-friendly site, you’ll want to utilize a sitemap. You don’t want all of the hard work put into making a website to go unnoticed through having a site people won’t stay on. Having a clear, easily navigated, organized website will encourage people to stay on it and click around, making sure all the work and information put into it will be seen.

In Regards To SEO

A sitemap lists every page on your site so that search engine bots can find all the information you have available on your website and learn how they relate, so they can make better sense of your content for search engine optimization. This is to say that these search engine bots are figuring out the relevancy of your site to the searches people make, and whether you are on the first page of results or further back. Ergo, this affects your visibility.

Finding And Indexing.

Search engine bots will still find and index your site without a sitemap, but that doesn’t mean they will see everything you want them to. This means that they may not recognize all the content you have to offer, and your search engine ranking can call. A sitemap will help with this.

Sitemaps have a list of all pages on your site so search engine bots will be able to find and index all of them. They also include metadata, which is context about every page, which tells the search engine bots how the pages on your website are organized, how they relate to each other, their update history, and more.

This is why they’re so important to ensure that search engine bots can recognize all the content you have, rather than potentially missing something, and so that they can mark how they relate.

SEO is about more than just keywords. The optimization of a site is in every part of it, from the way it is designed to the content on it to your potential sitemap. Having a sitemap for your site helps with SEO because it tells search engine bots everything they need to know about your site, which is what helps them figure out where your site falls in search results. Thus, having a sitemap boosts the visibility of your website by raising its rank in search results.

Can You Get Away Without Using A Sitemap?

If you have a small website that is comprehensively linked without much in the way of media, you could get away without using a sitemap. But you probably still should, for the sake of the user experience and to help your SEO rankings.

If you have a large or new website, you’ll most certainly need a sitemap. This is because with large websites, it’s much easier for search engine bots to miss information than in smaller ones. It’s also harder to navigate a large site without one, leading to frustrated users. If you have a new site, it probably won’t be linked to on other sites, which will make it harder for search engine bots to find. Uploading a sitemap will make it more visible and easier to index.

Need Help Staying On Top Of Sitemaps?

With Google coming out with a fifth version of their XML sitemaps soon, it’s important to be educated on the values of sitemaps and how they can help your business. Here at Performance Driven Marketing, we know the importance of a good user experience and SEO for increasing your visibility. If you would like to learn more about how our experts can help you, please contact us at Performance Driven Marketing today!

How important are customer reviews to a business? Nine out of ten customers claim they read online reviews prior to working with a business. With at least 88% of consumers trusting online reviews as much as a referral or personal recommendation, it is an essential component of your online marketing strategy.

Online reviews have an impact on your sales. However, obtaining reviews has always seemed to be a challenge for businesses. How do you know your most satisfied customers will leave reviews? What should you do in the event you receive a negative review?

Getting Started with Online Reviews

Understanding how reviews work is the place to start. Business owners need to take some time to familiarize themselves with Google My Business and other social platforms where customers leave reviews. Depending upon your industry, you may find yourself dealing with reviews on websites like:

Yelp
Facebook
Yellowpages
TripAdvisor
Manta
Amazon
Citysearch
Foursquare

Local Businesses and Online Reviews

Multiple studies show that 53% of customers will visit a business within 48 hours of performing a local search. In addition, 33% of customers surveyed by ReviewTrackers say they will not eat in a restaurant with less than 4 stars or multiple negative reviews.

Bad reviews will hurt your business and can drop your website ranking. In fact, one single negative review can drop sales by 5-8% or more!

Google My Business

Each month, Google averages about 158.3 million visitors. With such high exposure, it pays to spend some time optimizing your profile. It is free to claim your Google My Business profile and it does give your business a stronger local presence. Once you have verified your business listing, your website will start to appear in the search engine results and people can start leaving reviews.

Google My Business does provide an option for businesses to post updates and share information directly with the customers. If you do not have a website, or you feel your website is not that impressive, your Google My Business page will become one of the best free resources you have available to keep focused on attracting customers.

Asking for Customer Reviews

It is important to ask your customers for reviews. We utilize services that make it easier for customers to submit a review. We can customize a personalized email and SMS text message tool that will go directly to the customer, making it easier for them to leave a review.

Never be afraid to ask customers directly for a review. If they are in your store and having a great interaction, ask them to leave a review. Most customers are happy to leave a positive review when they have a good interaction with the business in person.

Handling a Negative Review

What happens when you have a negative review? The most important thing we can stress is to avoid attacking the reviewer. Before you even respond to the review, you need to make sure you know all the facts. One thing you can do is make sure you read the review, take the information into consideration and respond positively.

When you respond, the upset customer may update their review or might even remove it entirely. Potential customers will be able to see the response and notice that the business does care about customer satisfaction and is seeking to always improve.

Add Reviews to Your Website

Customers love testimonials as it gives them peace of mind. People want to know what type of experiences people have been experiencing with the business. Use a variety of clients to provide feedback in multiple industries and continue improving the conversion rates for your business.

Online reviews are vital to each industry. Failing to prioritize online reviews can be detrimental to your business. Reputation is everything in the modern Internet-driven world. Successful reviews may not happen immediately, but with the right tools and engagement strategy, you will be able to see a boost in your online reputation and website traffic!

Are you a small business owner impacted by coronavirus (COVID-19)? In Utah, small businesses make up 90% of all employers and represent just under half of the state’s total workforce, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. As many businesses are closed, or running at partial capacity, many business owners are looking for new ways to try and keep their businesses alive in a time of crisis. Fortunately, the Internet can help local businesses find way to stay connected with customers and continue turning a profit. Here are some tips that will help your business thrive right now, but also be prepared for any future crisis like COVID-19 that have forever changed how small businesses are run.

Creating short-term and long-term plans

Never stop marketing your business. Even if you run a dental practice that is currently closed to everything except dental emergencies, you need to continue online marketing. Internet traffic for many local businesses offering in-person services (dentistry, carpet cleaning, massage therapy, restaurants) are all seeing declines in traffic right now as many people are concerned about exposure risk, and businesses are following Utah state-issued guidelines.

The importance of online marketing comes down to this, when you STOP marketing your business, you will lose business. Pausing your marketing service will place your business in a situation when you are reactive in June, July and August. When businesses can start opening again, where will your website be as they search for local service? In time, markets will start to recover and many of our friends and neighbors will be back to work and back in their stores. Making marketing decisions based on fear will doom your business.

We recommend creating a business reality plan for 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. Our expert marketing team is here to help you understand your market, and what you need to do in order to get through this crisis. We want to stress to you that there ARE options. While you can look at your past strategies that have worked, we can help you identify other tactics that you have not implemented before. In fact, we recommend local businesses owners should consider marketing MORE during this time.

How can you market with a cash flow shortage?

This is not the time to give up. What can you do if you are trying to stay alive, and have limited funds for marketing? Here’s a marketing game-plan to help you get started:

- Focus on your website. Is this the time to redesign or enhance your website? YES! When traffic is slower to your site, it’s a great time for a website revamp. In a month or two, you can set up a new marketing campaign as the economy reopens to announce your new website and how it makes your customer’s lives easier.
- Google my business. Your best friend online is always going to be Google. Whether you like it or not, Google organic search drives more than 50 percent of all website traffic. Don’t fight against Google recommendations, embrace them and your website will improve.
- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. All your basic social media accounts NEED engagement. Social media provides one of the easiest and simple ways to get in front of your customers. Local business owners can control the messages that are sent to the customers. We have found great success with social media as it not only gets a clear message to the customer, it’s a great way to improve customer relationships. Over 80% of small business revenue comes from existing customers. If you aren’t getting in front of those customers with social media, you could lose them.
- YouTube. Explainer videos are a great way to educate your customers. For example, let’s say you own a plumbing business and you want to connect with your customers. A great way to do this is to film yourself working on a basic repair job. You can offer some troubleshooting tips to the customers on how they can make some repairs on their own. While you think you might be losing business, you won’t. 90% of online shoppers say they will use videos to help them make purchasing decisions. Basic explainer videos give you an opportunity to showcase your skillset to your customers and show people why YOU are the local experts in your industry.

PDM Pro Tip: “Explainer videos less than 15 seconds long are shared 37% more often.”

Print media. As local business owners are struggling to make ends meet, a number of print media resources are cutting print advertising costs. Ask your account representative about a print marketing campaign that will help you get directly to the doorstep of your target audience.

Know your traffic and clean up your website

If you want to create a comprehensive approach to online marketing, take a look at your analytics data. The referral data can show you if there are other sources you need to update and if there are other places you need to spend time working on in order to remain connected to your customers.

While we know not everyone is an online marketing expert, there are things you can do to clean up your website. Take some time to review every page on your website and ask yourself the following questions:

Is the content relevant to the page?
Are the images and content outdated?
Do we have a clear message on our website?
Is the website easy to navigate?
Are we driving customers to the right call-to-action areas?

Small business crisis marketing gameplan

Keeping your business connected is vital to business success. Follow our pro tips to make sure your business has a strategy for the next three months:

Let your customers know you are open for business
1. If you are still open, tell your customers! Inform people daily on social media how your business is responding to COVID (or whatever new crisis our country may be dealing with). If you aren’t telling people your business is open, your customers may assume your business is closed. Have a clear message on your website homepage and update those social media accounts! If your business has closed, inform customers what they can do in the meantime and when they can expect to hear back from you if they do try and contact your business.
Update your website with a pop-up banner
1. As previously mentioned, you need to update your website. Your website is your 24/7 sales team. Include a pop-up or banner message that clearly informs your customers how your business is responding to the crisis.
Update Google my business
1. If you do not have a website, focus on your Google my business listing. Your business listing is a valuable way to connect to your customers. Update your hours and you can post on there about staffing issues and why it may take longer to respond to messages during this time.
Blog
1. During times of uncertainty, people need to know that something is “the same”. A blog post is a great way to let people know that. Keeping your website updated with new and fresh content keeps your website in good graces with Google, in addition to giving you something new you can share with customers on your social media accounts.
SMS messages
1. Do you have a strong customer base that has signed up for a text message service? Text message marketing is a great way to provide an update on business hours and availability.
Social media
1. We already talked about social media, but we want to remind you of the importance of updating your social profiles. The entire world is facing COVID-19 and many people are stuck at home….and bored. People are spending more time on social media, giving your business ample opportunity to get in front of your customers and leads.

PDM Pro Tip: Use community-based groups to inform local customers that your business is open.

Nextdoor and other local community groups
1. Share relevant information with other local websites. Contact your city offices and ask them if they will provide an update about your business on their website and social media accounts. Join Nextdoor to connect with your local customers and share relevant information.

Handling customer contact during COVID-19

If your business is currently interacting with customers in the office, it’s a great time to make sure you are showing HOW your business is responding to COVID-19. Wearing facemasks in the workplace, practicing diligent hand-washing and cleanliness is essential. Bring our your brand message with some promotional materials you can hand out, like hand sanitizer! Showing people how you respond to COVID-19 is bringing them peace of mind as they know the risk of infection occurring from interaction with your business is low thanks to your adherence to OSHA and CDC requirements.

Community giveaways and local support

A great way to share good news with your local audience is by offering a community-related giveaway. There are some great benefits to working with your local city office and finding out how your business can help support current needs. It can be something as simple as donating facemasks, gloves, hand sanitizer, hand soap, etc. Local offices are working with businesses to give them adequate support during this time, which brings about some great exposure in the community. Here are a few suggestions on what your business can do to show support:

Donate supplies like hand sanitizer to key workers
Donate or sponsor a food giveaway for families in need or to nursing homes and local shelters

PDM Pro Tip: Customers want to know businesses care about them and the community. Do what you can to provide service to strengthen your relationship with the local community.

Strengthen your business reputation

Look for some ways to build your business reputation. Podcasts, digital conferences, and speaking opportunities in your niche market provide you with the ability to truly establish your business as the one “in the know” about your industry. Virtual conferences are a great way to showcase your skillset to your target audience.

Local podcasts are always seeking business owners to interview and discuss various topics. Find a good podcast and reach out to them. Establish yourself as an expert by offering your opinion and return as a guest time and time again to generate more buzz!

How about hosting a digital event? No matter what industry you are in, you can host a digital event. Restaurants can offer a free cooking class and teach people how to make sushi, or some other fun dish! Contractors can show some pro tips on how to correctly finish sheet rocking your business. No matter what industry, you can take your top customer questions and needs and create a date and time to show them to answer with a digital event.

If you have a particular skillset that you would normally charge money for, offer online training courses and charge a small fee. You’d be surprised to see how many people will sign up for a course if you are the expert teaching them valuable information.

PDM Pro Tip: A good email list and a clean marketing message will help deliver the correct information to your core audience and will encourage them to share it with others.

Deep breaths….online traffic will return

We don’t have all the answers, but we know online traffic will return. People are searching online, even if your business is currently closed. When things calm down and people begin returning to their workplaces, searches will increase. In the meantime, we recommend staying on top of Google Trends and finding ways to offer answers to questions. Find a way to make trending searches relatable to your industry.

Don’t Ignore Your Website

Ignoring your website can have devastating consequences. Google continues to release updates to their search engine algorithm, which could take a website from page 1 to page 3 in a day. You need to make sure your website makes a solid first impression as it is often the first experience most people will have with your business.

What to Consider for a Website Re-do

As you start scouring other websites for ideas on what you’d like to incorporate into your website redesign, we recommend understanding the importance of color, layout, functionality, and user experience. While a great looking site might impress you, it is important to consider the back-end of your website and the work that must be done to help Google and other search engines actually FIND your website and start ranking it. At Performance Driven Marketing, we provide local search engine optimization services for customers all over Utah, Idaho, California, and surrounding areas. Our team will help you bring your vision of a new website to life, or we can create a vision for you. Here are some of the important elements that must go into refreshing your website:

Website Design

The overall design of the website is vital as it needs to have a design that reflects your company image. To be noticed online, the design needs to be relevant and useful while also being unique. To help your website stand out, we use the following techniques:

Implementing geometric shapes and lines
Creative styling and fonts
Multi-tone gradient imagery
Mobile responsiveness
Custom logo creation and home page design

User Experience

While the look and feel of the website needs to be impressive, the overall user experience is vital to keeping a person from clicking off your website. The viewer needs to be able to find their way around your site effectively for them to find what they are looking for. Web users do not have patience and they will jump off a site quickly if they cannot find the information they need right away.

We find that web users like to be told what to do. Well structured menus and organized information helps them to properly navigate the website, making it easier on the user to find what they want. We recommend a clear call to action on a page, and always have your contact information visible for customers that choose to call or email you.
Avoid extra buttons and unnecessary information that can overwhelm your potential customers. Keep a single call to action on a page and stick with a prominent search bar function at the top of each webpage and a link to the sitemap at the bottom. Clean, easy, simple websites are those that often gain the most visitors.

Content

Content is essential for your website to rank properly. Google has been working hard to remove spam websites from the search engine. Websites that clearly copy content from another site risks being banned from the search engines entirely. Content needs to be clear and immediately available for the potential customers to understand answers to their questions. With the right information at their fingertips, customers will start turning to your company as the authority figure and the source of information in the industry. Engaging, useful, and professional content is the best way to accomplish this goal.

How do you create quality content?

You need to start by defining your audience and asking common questions that pertain to them. Fill out each question with an insightful answer, similar to a face-to-face conversation. As you answer these questions, focus on your ability to solve your client’s problems. Quality content will be able to build trust with your industry and can help to spread your brand’s name across the Internet.

Bridging the Gap with SEO

The term SEO tends to cause skepticism to some people as they assume you don’t need to do much for a website once it’s live. However, without the right optimization of the website, your online presence can struggle to be seen. We want your website to meet its true online potential without costing you an arm and a leg. Modern SEO goes much further than adding keywords, ALT tags, and mobile-friendliness. Let Performance Driven Marketing help your website thrive with our proven techniques.

In the digital era of fast-paced Internet and impatient web user, you cannot afford to have an outdated, slow, poorly designed website. If you are planning a website redesign, or you want to see what you can do to improve your website’s visibility, call our Ogden SEO Company today.

Officially, as of September 26^th, Google Hummingbird changed the landscape of the SEO realm. Since its unofficial release about a month previous to Google’s 15^th anniversary, it has affected more than 90 percent of internet searches. And, while Google Panda and Penguin were minor changes to Google’s algorithm, Google Hummingbird is a complete overhaul of the algorithm, replaced with something altogether new.

Google Past and Present

Before Google Hummingbird, the search algorithms mainly relied on key terms to give the searchers what they were looking for. However, with the new and improved algorithm, Google is focusing less on the actual words being used in the search phrase and more on what they mean. In this way, Google has moved from a focus on individual keywords to semantics.
These changes became necessary when voice searches on mobile devices started to become popular. People are now using longer, more conversational search phrases to find new restaurants in their area, for instance. Google is accommodating for that with an algorithm that identifies the core meaning of the search phrase and pulls up relevant information accordingly.

What Do These Changes Mean for SEO?

Naturally, the next step is to see how these changes force internet marketing companies to adapt their strategies. Here are some basic tips that should help you survive in the world of Google Hummingbird:

Focus on words and the synonyms of those words that are relevant to your customers
Make your content match questions that customers frequently ask
Allow your writing to include conversational search phrases
Add relevant combinations of items in your content that are often searched together
Remember that high-quality, relevant content is what Google is ultimately looking for

Now, more than ever, content is king. Fire up those thinking caps and make sure that your website has beautifully relevant and well-written content that will appeal both to Google and to Google users. Having a mobile website will also facilitate an easier move from Google’s graveyard to Google Hummingbird.
Whether you’re interested in having content written, having your website optimized for search engine optimization, or getting a mobile website, Performance Driven Marketing has the experts to help you! Call us today at (801)-698-4129!

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4 Ways To Increase Internet Traffic