Home » Archives for LeAnn Gros
Author

LeAnn Gros

LeAnn Gros has nearly a decade of experience freelance writing SEO content for business and eCommerce websites. Her background of expertise includes keyword research, market research, content optimization, web development and creative writing.

Web Design

Web Design Challenges to Avoid if You Want To Be Successful with SEO

by LeAnn Gros
written by LeAnn Gros

I’ve seen these scenarios before and you may have encountered them yourself. 

Scenario A, a business hires a great team to design and build a masterpiece of visual art and design to market their brand name, image and product line. Only to later find out, this team was lacking in one major knowledge aspect of web design, and that’s SEO. 

Or we look at Scenario B, a business tried to build their website and design it themselves without expert guidance, including various elements, javascript, codes and more that they had no idea were harming their SEO. 

Let’s look over these common areas of failure within web design that can cause a huge headache to your search engine ranking success. 

Not Delivering Customer Answers

You’ve heard it many times, content is king. Yet it’s not so simple. Long gone are the days where you could overload your website with content regardless of the context or formatting and search engines thought you were an expert, shooting you to the top. This usually involved black hat methods like keyword stuffing.

Now, search engines are looking at customer experience as it pertains to getting their questions resolved quickly and efficiently. So how do you get your content to do this the right way? 

  1. Providing readable text in a friendly font, color, and appropriate size. 
  2.  Using formatting that aligns paragraphs correctly, bullet points key lists and arranges the content in such a way that the user can hone in on the answer pretty quickly within the content. 
  3. Directs the customer on where they need to go afterward, maybe, if they just read about the construction of skateboards, they are interested in buying one, so having quick access to your skateboarding shopping cart is prevalent. This also leads to more conversions. 

If your web design is delivering offensive fonts, colors, and layout schemes for content that doesn’t make sense or is difficult to read, you’ll probably notice an influx of customers bouncing from your website. These bounce rates will harm your search engine rankings significantly.

Huge Files That Run Your Website To The Ground

Those large scale high-resolution images or videos scrolling through a carousel on your product page or home page are great facets of imagery to sell your customers on. Having visually popping content is great and many web design companies will focus on this, but focusing on it in the wrong way will hurt your SEO. 

Large files, images, and videos slow down your page speed significantly if they are not properly implemented. Multiple studies have been done by top Google developers that prove, increasing page speed attributes to larger percentages of conversions, lower percentages of bounce rates, and higher success overall for a website’s rankings.

Web Design companies can avoid slowdowns, while still providing high-quality content, images, and videos by implementing key additions to websites like caching tools that improve website speed and browsing by downloading these files onto the hard drive instead of always retrieving them from a remote server. 

Unresponsive Mobile Webpages

As of this year, search engine giants like Google have taken the step to announce their desire to begin looking at websites based on mobile-friendliness and their ability to be crawled. There’s no avoiding the fact that the majority of web searches are being done from mobile devices than from desktops. This serves as an important understanding as to why having a mobile responsive design is essential for your SEO. 

If you’re unsure of your website’s mobile responsiveness, take Google’s test here to find out.

Hire the Right Web Design Team

If you’re in the market for a re-design of your website, the right approach to hiring any team, is to look at their ability to also deliver common-sense best practices for search engine optimization within their designs. Taking this approach will help you avoid SEO disasters in the future.

0 comment
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
BusinessFacebookFacebook AdvertisingFacebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger is Being Revamped, How It Can Benefit Businesses

by LeAnn Gros
written by LeAnn Gros

Facebook has recently dealt with much criticism and backlash for how they have handled user privacy and data thus far. It’s no surprise that this concern and backlash is being followed up by their desire to completely revamp applications like Facebook Messenger. 

Announced directly at the F8 conference, the overhaul of the messenger app won’t just be in the form of benefiting the individual users but also to benefit businesses who utilize the social media platform as a means for marketing and customer relations. 

Here are two key changes to Facebook Messenger that businesses could directly benefit from in the future. 

Connecting Employees

Facebook has always been geared towards engaging with the individual users themselves, but it looks as though they are wanting to step up to the plate on helping businesses communicate internally. By announcing new features that will allow group calls, project and task collaboration and the ability to place the messenger app on a desktop PC means they are now directly competing with popular business services like GoToMeeting and Skype. 

With the additional launch of their Workplace tool, this only adds more to the blow being delivered to other similar business services. While the workplace tool has a free or paid version, it works relatively fine as the free out of the box version, in fact, most comparisons to services like GoToMeeting, show Facebook’s Workplace as offering more to users in their unpaid version.

It would seem they are entering into a new market of business communications and no longer just focusing on individual private user communication. 

Connecting Businesses to Customers

Time and resources are limited to businesses and affect how they choose to communicate with their customer base. A lot of the time staff are put in charge of handling social media communications and responding to inquiries that really could be handled by a more automated process to free up wasted employee time, that could be benefited elsewhere. 

Facebook Messenger will be revamped to help free up communication time in two very direct ways through the app. 

Lead Generation Ad’s and Templates

Facebook has announced the addition of lead generation templates found within the Ads Manager. These templates will prove successful in getting customers to come from an Ad into a quick Q&A chat within the messenger app. This helps businesses get more leads from their facebook marketing tactics and drives the customer into potentially scheduling a service or converting directly to purchase right within the app. 

One way to helpfully manage this kind of service is giving businesses the ability to completely automate it with responses that make the customer feel as though they are chatting with an actual representative when really it’s a bot. Not to worry though, if a complex question comes through, the chatbot has the ability to pass on that question to a live person instead. 

Scheduling Services

This directly ties into the Lead Generation Ads. This Q&A process has the potential to send appointment booking requests directly to customers from within the messenger app. They can book their appointment through the facebook messenger service and they’ve done it with very limited influence directly from the staff themselves. This frees up a lot of business resources and allows for faster customer conversions. 

The idea behind these significant revamps stems entirely from a consumer standpoint that customers want to be able to get their answers, information and booking services without leaving one platform for another. This ease of use pertains to increased popularity in increasing positive user experience. 

0 comment
2 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
MarketingPrivate School

Private School Marketing Ideas in 2023

by LeAnn Gros
written by LeAnn Gros

Outdated marketing tactics within the private schooling sector have attributed significantly to a disappointing lack of growth in private school enrollments. Actually, enrollment percentages have not grown in nearly half a century.  For decades private schools have relied on mail campaigns, local ads, and billboards. There is little to be said about their marketing campaigns or websites in our very digitally driven world. So how can the marketing that is available in 2019 help boost enrollment for private schools across the country? Here are some ideas.

Responsive and User-Friendly Web Designs

This should be common sense, right? Unfortunately, websites are the most lacking aspect of American private schools. With the oncoming wave of millennial parents deciding where to enroll their children, it is important now more than ever to step onto a properly built, user-friendly, and creative web design to market private schooling. The first impression a parent will receive about a private school will come directly from their web presence and this is how parents will gauge a school’s vision and mission for its students.

Use Content to Drive Communication

Programs, academic achievements, sports, and news are great content initiatives for a school’s online presence. These topics can be thoroughly described and shared on websites, social platforms, and even blogs. It’s important to build an active relationship with your community, not just physically but digitally as well. Recent surveys by the Council for American Private Education have shown that the information parents are searching for when choosing the right school is:

  • Accreditation
  • Curriculum and Courses
  • College Acceptance Rates
  • Religious Instruction
  • Standardized Test Results

These topics should be the focal point of content on your web platforms. Share success stories and academic achievements that showcase the discipline as well as the successful culture of your private school. Another study found that 61% of parents were searching for more responsive teachers and administrators, a perfect way to make parents feel you’re more responsive and easier to communicate with is to get them involved in your school’s blogs, forums, or social media accounts.

Always be sure that your content is SEO optimized for local keywords and trends within private school networks so you are easily found by your community on search engines.

Set up a Pay per Click (PPC) Campaign

Pay per click ads can be set up to display to anyone who is searching online for private school education providers locally or within the guidelines you set. It is very likely PPC campaigns will lead to conversions as your market prospects are already actively seeking to make a decision when they are browsing. PPC campaigns can also drive traffic to your updated content and responsive web design which will further entice parents and students to finalize their decision.

Provide Guidance to Parents and the Community

This new and trending marketing concept entails the school to come up with some hard-hitting topics or questions that seem all too common for many parents and students. Pull together information on this topic and present it to them along with who you are in the form of a free webinar. You can also offer this web service in exchange for lead information such as email addresses and phone numbers. Providing this online service will help you develop a relationship with your prospective clients and get your foot in the door to continue marketing to them later.

0 comment
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Call Now Button