Increase Traffic to Your Site

SonasMedSpa gets a face lift, now called MadisonMedSpa

September 20, 2016 By waldo

Launching a site with a new domain or changing your domain can be tricky. And it can take months for your new site to rank well. Typically you would setup 301 redirects to redirect the old pages to the new ones on the new domain.

SonasMedSpa.com had this issue when they changed their domain to MadisonMedSpa.com.

We setup 301 redirects. But the real post came from writing a series of blog posts highlighting various aspects of MadisonMedSpa.com. Most of their business is in Madison.

Initially MadisonMedSpa.com was not appearing on the search pages for searches such as “botox madison CT: But after a short period of time they were starting to rank well for this and other search phrases.

Google+ Business

January 1, 2015 By waldo

If you have a brick and mortar company Google+ Business is perhaps the most cost effective way to market your business. Google’s mantra has always been to give the user the best possible experience. They know that 97% of consumers look for local business online. Thus they recognize the importance of local search and recently made some sweeping changes in response to this demand.

Google+ Business and Google Search are directly linked and Google Search is the largest search engine in the world. Thus it’s imperative that any local business create and optimize its Google+ Business page.

Below are the highlights of the importance of having a good Google+ Business page:

free and fast way to get number one ranking on Google
drive more traffic to your site/store
help you stand out from your competitors
boost engagement with images/videos/blog
ability to offer coupons
feedback from your potential/existing customers
increase profits

This short primer will discuss best practices to ensure that your Google+ Business page ranks well and serves as powerful magnet to attract customers to your store.

First and foremost claim your listing. Unbeknownst to you Google is usually able to glean information about your company and create a simple Google+ Business page. However, this is a very thin page and you should claim it so you can manage the page.

The easiest way to go to http://plus.google.com/pages/create Follow the wizard, and choose the most appropriate option to classify your business. You will then need to verify the business sometime they will send a postcard or make a phone call to the number associated with your account. This procedure ensures that only the actual owner of the business can make changes to the page. Once you are verified you can administer your account. Below are some best practices.

1: Edit your business information – In this section you list basic company information there’s also a spot for a description of your company. This should be short but compelling and persuasive. You also can list various categories. Please make certain you belong in the categories. Lastly don’t skip and sections, 100% completing is critical for high rankings.

2: Add photos and videos – You can add up to 10 photos and 5 videos. At the very least you should upload 5 photos. Maxing out your photos and videos will really help push you to the top.

3: Get reviews – 90% of people trust reviews from people they know, but 70% trust reviews from people they don’t know. This is way reviews are so important as they establish “social proof”. However, it’s very difficult to get customers to add reviews to your Google+ Business page. That’s the bad news, the good news is that all your need is a handful of reviews to climb to the top. Lastly too many reviews can actually hurt you, ideally you want to get a maximum of one review a month.

4: Monthly postings. Writing a short blog post about your business is a great way to engage your audience, learn about and show of your knowledge.

Couple of things never to do

1: No gaps fill out all fields, even optional ones
2: Set it and forget it, update on regular basis and read reviews
3: Post fake reviews
4: Stuff your page with key words

FAQ –

1: How to get high rankings – Complete all section, add photos with good description, try and get one review a month. Add a new post once a month.

2: How to handle bad review – Respond publicly, this can be a PR win because it proves that you take review seriously. Negative feedback can be helpful, they might be correct. You can adjust and then publicly thank them. Also a few negative reviews adds authenticity to your overall listings. Plus we all know that nobody can make everyone happy all the time.

3: Why isn’t my listing showing up in the search results – Google+ Business is starting to get competitive, it’s imperative to follow the steps outlined here.

4: Why is there already a listing for my business – Google spiders can crawl the web and create pages on their own.

5: Why do I need to claim my listing – You now control and have access to stats, such as how people asked for directions to your business.

New sites looks great, but traffic doesn't !!

July 29, 2013 By waldo

I have heard this story too many times and feel it’s time to share the remedy.

A successful E-commerce company recently launched a new site. The new site looked great and they anticipated a positive bump in sales. Wow were they disappointed. Sales were off almost $10,000 thirty days after the launch of the new site. They contacted me in a panic. It took our engineers about 5 minutes to diagnose the problem.

All of the page names were changed and Google wasn’t notified. This would be similar to a restaurant moving across town AND changing its telephone number to an unpublished number.

Let me explain what happened, the real customer name will not be revealed. Google indexes websites on a regular basis and uses its proprietary logarithm to determine how they rank a particular page. Google ranked many of his pages on the first page of search results. So as an example a person looking for “blue plastic folding widgets” would see his page appearing on the first page. Note Google would list the web address and a specific page. So Google would list www.bluewidgets.com/folding.html. However, if the new site renamed that page to www.bluewidgets.com/folding-plastic.html the old page would no longer work. A person clicking on that link would get the dreaded 404 error, or “page not found”.

The shopper would then go back to Google and the click on a different web address, bypassing www.bluewidgets.com. This type of activity would dramatically reduce sales.

The solution is very simple, yet it’s surprising how few web designers understand the correct procedure for launching new sites. Reusing the same page names is one solution, but a better solution is to create what is referred to a as a “301 Redirect”. Basically you provide Google and other search engines with a map of the old pages and the corresponding new page pages. In this example we would map “www.bluewidgets.com/folding.html” to “www.bluewidgets.com/folding-plastic.html”. So when a person clicks on the old page that automatically are redirected to the page. Eventually Google removes the old page from its search results and shows the new page name.

Sad to say most web designers don’t use 301 redirects. The result is that the clients have to wait for Google to index the new pages, which can take between one to three months.

Once the problem was explained to the client and 301 redirects traffic and sales quickly were restored to their previous levels.

In closing, when are you ready to discuss launching a new website with your designer make certain they are familiar with 301 redirects.

Is your site built for speed ?

June 19, 2013 By waldo

According to study by Akamai 40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

Slow loading websites are bad for your business. In a store you will wait a few minutes to speak with a salesperson, but on the web you can simply close the slow loading site and load another site. Why wait when there are so many others sites.

We live in a fast-paced world and the Internet is all about speed and convenience.

Google recently account that a slow loading website can have a negative impact on your Google ranking. Google is constantly working to provide users with the best possible experience, and “fast” is “good”. Click here to read more from Google Blog for Webmasters.

There are couple of reasons for a slow loading website:

Poorly designed site
Hosted on an inferior or overloaded server
Large photos that were not resized, or too many photos on a page
Flash files
Large amount of external calls to other websites

It’s expensive to rewrite a poorly built site but there are two easy ways to ensure your site loads quickly. One is use a good hosting company.

Web Hosting as become a commodity and many people are using cheap overloaded hosting solutions. Take a peek at the graphics displaying the load time for a site before they moved to our hosting platform. The site took 5.52 seconds to load, almost 6 seconds.

Old hosting company. Load time almost 6 seconds.

Would you wait that long to view a page. It’s a beautiful site and worth the wait, but unfortunately, too many left. Now take a look at the load speed after it was moved to our hosting server. The load speed is 730 milliseconds, or LESS THAN ONE SECOND.

Large photos is a huge problem especially with many people uploading photos from their iPhones or digital cameras. There are many free programs that allow you to resize your photos, check to see if one was included with your camera. Many free online programs allow you to reduce the size of your photos as well as make simple edits. I tell my clients to investigate PicMonkey, it’s free and easy to use.

So before you spend a ton of money on a Search Engine Optimization make certain your photos are not too big and you have a good hosting solution. Click here to test the load time of your site.

Go Mobile – Attend our free Mobile seminar next Tuesday in Branford

May 7, 2013 By waldo

Learn three ways mobile websites are moving businesses forward and the top 5 practices to creating a mobile site your customers will love.

The mobile web is exploding. More and more consumers access websites with their smartphone. By the end of this year it’s projected that more people will use their smartphone than their PC to get online.

Are you happy with the way YOUR site looks on a smartphone.

We are offering a free Mobile seminar at the Blackstone Library in Branford Tuesday May 14th at 4:30.

Click here to request a free mockup of a mobile design of your current website.

Hope to see you on Tuesday.

Andrew

Get #1 position on google in five easy steps, using Google Local

October 22, 2012 By waldo

If you own a brick and mortar business, then you should use Google Maps optimization to make it easier for you customers to find you. Plus this is the easiest way to achieve top ranking on Google.

Google is now give strong marks to correctly formatted Google local listing entries. It’s free and takes less than 15 minutes. Of course we are always available if you should have any questions.

“70% of US household now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services” (Kelsey Group)

Your first step is setup your your Google Local account with your basic information.

However, it’s important to follow the 5 key points:

1: Make certain to fill out all the basic information, address, web site, email hours of operation, etc.

2: Create a well written description that uses key words a potential customer would use when searching for your company.

3: Fill out all five categories, this will increase your chances of top ranking.

4: Include at least 5 photos and ideally a video is you have one.

5: This is the MOST important one. Encourage your customers to write reviews. Do not create fake reviews. Ideally you want one new review a month. This will catapult your rankings to the top.