Common Web Design Mistakes to Avoid
Websites are now clearly the most clear ‘digital handshake’ that a business can make with their customers and potential customers. But because they are still new for a lot of business owners, the focus on them isn’t as great as it could be.
And that means that many websites and businesses are making simple, but avoidable mistakes in their web design. Ironing out these errors can go a long way towards:
- Having a more effective website
- Driving more leads
- Getting more calls and appointments, and,
- Ultimately, winning more work and growing your revenue.
To show you some of the ‘quick wins’ you can get on to today, we’ve created a short checklist to work through with your own website.
Be Clear in What You Want
We once reviewed one of the best pieces of business website writing we’d ever seen. It was interesting. It was insightful. It was even funny. But it went from being a 10/10 to a 7/10 for one reason: it didn’t have a call to action.
Every business has a call to action. It might be scheduling a free quote. It might be making an appointment to talk on the phone or via video chat. Or it might be scheduling a trial. But so many pieces of website writing lack this element.
...5 Things You Should Know Before Building Your First Website
The online world has become increasingly popular over the past decade or so. Online businesses are very common in the modern world, and most traditional businesses now have at least some sort of online presence. With the increase in online business comes an increase in the need for new websites and web design professionals.
However, what a lot of people don’t realise is that content management systems like WordPress make it possible for the average person to build their own simple business website. Sure, a top, high traffic site will require significantly more work, but a simple small business site can be created in a couple of days if you do some research beforehand.
5 important things that you should know before you even attempt to build your first WordPress website include:
- You Need Some Sort Of Digital Strategy:
It is important to realise that you can’t just jump straight into your first website without having at least a few clearly defined goals and objectives. Doing this would be like trying to build a business without knowing what sort of business you were building. Before you even think about a website, you need to sit down and develop a clear, well-defined digital strategy.
...5 Tips for Success in Global eCommerce Businesses
One thing that always happens when a business starts to become bigger and bigger is that the market within the local region it is from gets saturated. It only makes sense that at this point, eCommerce businesses make the decision to go global in a bid to expand their horizons and grow even bigger as a company. In fact, many ecommerce businesses that go global depend on their international sales for the profits.
That being said, moving an ecommerce business into the multinational realm is nothing less than a highly sophisticated feat. There are plenty of things which factor in when it comes to manage a global ecommerce business. Here are some of the top tips that can help you expand your ecommerce business internationally with success.
- Be Clear On Objectives
A lot of companies have found success when they’ve expanded into international markets. They haven’t become successful by going in blindly. In order to make your business successful internationally, you should be clear on the goals you want to achieve with the expansion. You should not even consider expanding your ecommerce business to an overseas market if it isn’t seeing success locally. Only once you see success in your local market you will be able to go to an overseas market with less risk of failure.
...How To Use Newsjacking To Boost Your Website’s Authority
Do you watch the news? If you said yes, you most likely were thinking about the evening news when events at home and around the world are broadcast on your TV. The news in this instance is the news that relates to the niche or industry you are in, and if you’re not keeping an eye on that, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to use it for SEO purposes.
The opportunity relates to a technique known as ‘Newsjacking‘ and it is a great way to gain quick and easy boosts in traffic and ranking. First, you must be aware that this is not something you set up and then forget about. This is a technique that requires you to be quick off the mark and acting without delay. For this reason, many website owners outsource this work to a freelancer.
What newsjacking involves, is keeping a sharp lookout for events, announcements, press releases, product launches, and any other type of news that relates to your niche. There are several ways this can be done.
1) Subscribe to as many email lists and newsletters within your niche as you can, albeit use an email address that you don’t use for normal email.
2) On social media follow those accounts which release news and updates within your industry.
3) Bookmark websites that tend to carry news stories, and announcements within your niche.
4) Use software or a social media monitoring tool which alerts you to news and updates.
5) Do a google search each day for the terms [your niche] + ‘news’, ‘latest’, ‘press release’, ‘announcement’, etc.
As an example, let’s say you are in the health and fitness niche and on your website, you promote various health products including supplements. One morning a news story breaks about a well-known weight-loss supplement that has suddenly been banned from sale due to numerous users having side effects. This is the sort of story you can ‘newsjack’.
The next step is to do some keyword research relating to the story, and specifically the keyword that you are going to target in relation to it. Look for variations, synonyms and longer tail keywords which are closely related to your main keyword as well.
...Responsive Web Design & Branding – How Are They Related?
The modern digital world is evolving rapidly, and it can sometimes be hard to keep up. Over the past few years, responsive website design has become a major consideration for website owners. Lawyers such as Lawyers Perth tend to receive a lot of business through their websites, so it’s important for them to make sure that their site’s are up to modern standards. At Slinky Creative, they understand that professionals like Lawyers Perth tend to receive a lot of business through their websites, so it’s crucial to ensure that their sites are up to modern standards.
A responsive website design can also influence your branding efforts. Since branding is another crucial component of law firm digital strategy, it’s important to understand how the two are related and how you can use them to maximise your online visibility.
What Is A Responsive Website?
Let’s start simple. Basically, a responsive website is one which can adapt to the size of the device that it is being viewed on. You’ve probably noticed that a lot of websites look a lot different on different devices – what you see on your phone won’t be the same as what you see on your laptop. This is because they are designed to be a responsive website.
Being responsive let’s a website adapt to different screen sizes while maintaining a visually appealing and engaging design. It prevents content and images from appearing too small on mobile devices, and it makes sure that things look good at all times.
How Is Responsive Design Related To Branding?
Branding your law firm is a crucial part of carving out a niche for yourself. You might want to show your firm as professional, affordable, friendly or anything else. Branding lets you do so.
Branding involves things like making sure that your website and social media pages are professionally designed and managed, making sure that your design is consistent throughout your website and making sure that you convey a clear, consistent message.
A responsive design can help your business appear professional and well-managed. In the modern world, a website that doesn’t look good on a mobile device simply isn’t going to succeed. This will lead to a poor brand image and reputation, negatively impacting your online presence.
...Social Media Marketing Tips for Beginners
Social media marketing is the process through which you can build an online presence for yourself, your brand, or the products and services you provide by making use of social media platforms.
All social media marketing campaigns ultimately aim to create more traffic for a website in a bid to increase the visibility of products and/or services to boost the sales and help a company become more successful. The most popular social media platforms which can be found today are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Youtube.
Here are a few tips for beginners looking to make use of social media marketing to help them get started.
Decide the Platform Which You Will Be Using
As someone who is just starting off with social media marketing, you will have to choose which social media platform you want to use and then focus on those instead of trying to juggle between several platforms. Plenty of beginners make the mistake of choosing too many platforms when they start social media marketing. They are unable to take control of the situation because they cannot figure out how to use each of them effectively.
According to the goals that you have with your social media marketing strategy, choose the platform which will be best suited for you.
...When Is It Appropriate To Use Adwords To Market My Law Firm?
Google AdWords is an extremely powerful marketing tool that is used by people throughout the world. However, AdWords for lawyers and law firms, especially something like Family Lawyers Perth, is extremely competitive. In fact, law-related keywords are among the most competitive in the world, with the cost per click reaching more than $100 for the most in-demand ones.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should ignore AdWords in favour of more cost-effective advertising solutions. In some cases, using AdWords can actually be a great idea, especially when you tie it in with your other marketing efforts.
Below we will look at a few cases where it would be appropriate to use AdWords for your law firm. These include:
When You Have A Large Advertising Budget
Digital marketers advise that if your firm has a large advertising budget, you should consider spending at least some of it on AdWords. Although you might not get a great return on investment, the exposure you gain could outweigh the negative aspects. Even if you don’t make any money out of your AdWords marketing, the exposure and brand awareness you gain could lead to an influx of potential clients in the future.
When You’re At The Top Of The Search Engine Rankings
Unfortunately, AdWords isn’t necessarily the best way to market your business. Anyone can pay to have their website or business feature at the top of Google’s search engine results pages, which means that people don’t always see paid listings as reliable. This can reduce the number of people visiting your website through AdWords ads.
...Everything you need to know about voice search SEO
In recent years voice search has grown exponentially. As more and more people browse the internet from mobile devices, the use of voice search has become increasingly popular. This means that it’s a good idea to take voice search SEO into account when you’re developing new content for your site.
Ultimately, this can be difficult if you don’t really know what you’re doing. I’d recommend speaking with a professional SEO agency if you have the budget for that.
If you don’t, I’ve outlined some of the most important voice search basics in this article.
What Is Voice Search?
Basically, voice search involves a person speaking into their phone or other device and receiving an answer spoken back to them. As AI technology becomes more advanced, voice search is also becoming more popular – which means that it’s something that clever SEO professionals are starting to incorporate into their optimization strategies.
...Highs and Lows of Social Media Marketing in 2018
Social media marketing professionals are finding themselves quite busy these days. The Facebook US congressional hearing, the GDPR regulations, fake news and AI developments are creating quite the buzz.
There are a lot of things to consider. The budgets for marketing are being closely examined. Marketers have to show the business some value by providing more efficiency or better ROI.
Keeping that in mind, there are a lot of things that expert social media marketers are discussing. Here are a few of the most prominent topics about the highs and lows of social media marketing.
Influencer Marketing
There is a significant shift in the budget when it comes to associating with influencers. Instead of blindly throwing money at influencers, the approach is being strategically taken. There are more considerations being made. The investment towards micro influencers are more likely to become popular.
The mid to top level social media influencers are going to be involved in the same campaigns as the micro influencers are.
The reputation of influencers came to a head recently. Logan Paul, a major YouTube influencer disrespected a person that committed suicide in Japan.
There was action taken by YouTube. They suspended the advertisements on his channels. Things didn’t stop at that. There have been guidelines given and sanctions applied to content producers. they can no longer resort to dubious approach to get more subscribers.
There has been more discussion about the importance of metrics which ensure that things like this don’t get out of hand.
...Email Marketing is Not Dead
Digital marketing is what businesses are using in this day and age to make their profits nowadays. It is a convenient way for them to reach out to their customers and potential customers through the power of the internet with so many avenues available to them to use. Among the plethora of channels available to them, email marketing is one of the oldest. In fact, modern day digital marketing started off with email marketing.
The thing is that people are under the impression that email marketing is dead/dying now with social media marketing reaching new heights. This isn’t something you can really blame on them. It actually does look like email marketing is becoming redundant because of the prospects of social media marketing.
This is why we have put together this article. You are going to understand why email marketing is not dead but in fact, alive and booming even today.
Massive ROI
One of the main reasons why we can tell you for a fact that email marketing is nowhere near death is the massive returns it gives on investment. Among all the channels of digital marketing, this is the cheapest and provides the most value per dollar invested. According to the numbers we have here, the average return on investment in email marketing per dollar is north of $40.
That’s a 4000% return on the investment. The reason why it gives such good returns is that it helps businesses to stay right in front of their customers and provides specific opportunities to follow up and close in on lead generation. That leads to more sales. Plus it is personalized. It helps build personal connection with the customers.
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