Jim's Articles

Marketing recommendations to boost your business

Marketing and web design recommendations to grow your business? Regardless of the type of website you plan to create, a portfolio, a landing page, a personal blog, or a magazine-style site, you can apply these design principles to bring your website’s design to a level closer to enhanced readability and user experience. This will get you on your way to getting that professional-looking Web site; fast! So the first thing to keep in mind here is font choice. According to Masters of Digital Geelong, when designing websites intended for a general audience one should use sans serif fonts such as Roboto, Open Sans, Proxima Nova, Arial, or Helvetica and not Times New Romans or Playfair Display. This is really because sans serif fonts are easy on eyes, more recognizable, and therefore simpler to read. And that is what you want for your audience. You should also limit yourself to a max of three different font types for your entire website, and you should try and use a minimum font size of 16, which is generally considered the easiest for online reading.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of getting quality traffic from free, or organic, search results on the search engines (like Google and Bing). It’s important that the traffic you drive to your website is relevant to your industry. If you manage to attract a high volume of visitors searching for Macintosh computers while what you actually do is selling raincoats, the traffic will do you no good. SEO is one of the most important types of digital marketing. By optimizing your content for search engines, you can increase a steady stream of relevant traffic that will only grow over time. Without search engine optimization, people simply won’t be able to find you on the Internet. Some optimization techniques include: researching relevant keywords and including them into your website copy, optimizing your website titles, description and loading speed, building relevant backlinks.

What Factors Affect Local SEO? According to a local SEO case study by Moz, the factors that influence local SEO can be divided into 2 parts; factors that influence the local 3-pack and map rankings & those that influence organic search rankings. You can see that both the local 3-pack and organic listing rankings require Google My Business signals, Citation signals, Link signals, Reviews and OnPage signals as the major factors. Let’s discuss them in detail.

As a small business owner, you should be focusing on keywords relevant to your niche. Using such keywords, you can reach out to a limited but more specific audience. For instance, if you sell shoes online, “genuine leather shoes” might work better than the most popular keywords for you. That’s because the competition for long-tail keywords or specific phrase keyword is relatively low. Read additional info on Levelling up your business.

Keyword research is a critical component of SEO. There’s no point putting time, effort, and money into trying to rank for things that nobody is searching for (unless you just want to attract links). For example, say you sell software tutorials. It wouldn’t make sense to target a keyword like “how do i make the font larger in coffee cup html editor” because it has no search volume.… But while search volume is a reasonable indicator of traffic potential for this keyword, it can be misleading. This happens because the page ranking for the lower volume keyword is part of a broader topic, and gets traffic from other keywords. In other words, more people are looking for a coffeecup tutorial than a review. So, while search volume is a good way to filter for keyword ideas, always make sure to check estimated traffic to the pages that rank to get a better idea of true search traffic potential.

It used to be that people found local businesses through the printed Yellow Pages directory (to our surprise, they still exist, lol). But in the 21st century, online directories have become the ubiquitous norm. We’ve all used Yelp to find good eats, and there are hundreds more online directories these days. These directories are termed “citations” in the SEO world and are said to account for >10% of local ranking factors. So you definitely want to be listed in as many of these as possible, and more importantly, to be accurately listed in each citation. Read extra information on this website.