SEO – Decantery

Is it Time To Update Your Website?

When you work in web development, one of the most common questions you’ll get asked is How do you know when it’s time to update your website?

A manufacturing client of ours recently came to us about updating their website. While the website we created for them last year has been doing well, they were ready for some changes. Our client identified a perfect opportunity for a restructure to their product pages: While on sales calls, he realized that his company’s site should be organized more by industry and not product category. Over the last several weeks, we have collaborated with him to make this possible, and we are looking forward to making his job easier!

This caused us to start thinking about other reasons that it might be tell-tale signs that your website needs some TLC. Let’s dive in!

Time Flies When You’re Having Fun

Over time, if you have a live website and your business is doing well, it can be easy to forget that your online presence needs love and attention. Let’s cover a few instances of reasons to update your site:

Your website is not SEO-optimized.
- It’s assumed that most websites and their content are optimized for positive SEO results, but we also understand that this is not something every small to medium business knows about. Without proper SEO optimization, your website will not show up in Google searches as readily or won’t initiate enough conversions for you, among many other negative impacts. SEO optimization is one of our main services and we’d love to chat with you if SEO makes you say, “huh?”
Your website traffic has slowed down.
- If you’re tracking your website’s traffic, and you see that visitors, interactions, and conversions have been dwindling over time, your site might be due for some changes. While many factors go into why traffic may have slowed, it’s important to also keep up with the times. A digital audit is a perfect way to figure out where areas of opportunity are. You can also utilize remarketing techniques to bring visitors back to your website and close your conversion loop.
Your website is not mobile-friendly.
- 52% of online traffic is done on mobile devices. Check out how quickly mobile has taken over in the graphic to the right! That means that no matter how gorgeous your website is on your desktop screen, it’s vital to check how it looks on various mobile devices. If you have even the slightest feeling that it’s not easy to navigate while on a cell phone or tablet, it might be time to check your mobile settings and devise an update plan.
Visual trends have changed.
- All smart marketers know that following trends is a necessary nuisance. The trick is to accommodate trends in your visual identity without subscribing fully to them. This allows your branding and “look” to fit in with what’s popular without expiring too quickly. For instance, if an image slider on home pages is a successful visual addition, it’s a quick edit to make without compromising the current integrity or branding you have.
You’re not using form fills, subscription sign-ups, or value add options.
- If a prospect visits your website but doesn’t take anything away from it, have you really captured their interest? If your site doesn’t have a newsletter sign-up form, you’re missing out on engaging with prospects in the long run. Not sure about email marketing or email lead gen? We can help you with that! Other value add examples are downloadable PDFs and case studies—don’t forget to make downloads a conversion goal in your Analytics account! This allows you to gather even more information about potential customers.

All Things Considered

There are dozens of reasons why you need to update your website. Whether it’s simply a matter of “it’s been too long” or you want to drive more qualified leads into your sales funnel, your website deserves an update. Think of it as an online, living extension of your brand and company. Provide it with the right development and attention, and you’ll see ongoing positive impact.

Do you still feel like your website needs some TLC and aren’t sure where to start? Let us know! We love helping businesses explore and identify their options. Click the link below to drop us a line.

SEO Best Practices: Optimize Your Website’s Content

Here at Decantery, we love exploring best practices for our day-to-day tasks, and helping clients understand how we do what we do. Recently, we took the time to sit down with a client and discuss SEO best practices so that they can write more impactful content for their website. This post is a quick overview […]

Best Practices for Integrating Paid Search & Organic Insights

When it comes to integrating Paid Search and SEO, 1+1=3. The combination of both channels is stronger together, rather than they are on their own. This correlation was compounded when Google dropped their right rail ads from the SERP (search engine results page). Since then, top-of-the-page ad real estate increased from 3 to 4 placements. The increase of ad realestate decreases Organic listings from being seen above-the-fold and can require participation in Paid Search.

It’s imperative digital advertisers understand how Paid Search and Organic can work together. Paid Search and Organic performance insight should be leveraged through integrated optimization tactics.

Increase Your Ownership of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

When Paid Search and Organic both appear in the SERP results, particularly above-the-fold, the more page space you occupy, the less there is for your competition. Achieving this scenario exponentially increases your chance of being clicked and winning conversions.

So, what steps should you take? Try augmenting high ranking keywords with Paid Search. Test for a statistically significant amount of time to see if your increased takeover of SERP real estate subsequently drives more traffic, engagement or conversions.

Using Paid Search Data to Optimize Organic

Often, Paid Search is referred to as a sprint and SEO as a marathon. This is because Paid Search achieves first page results immediately, whereas, Organic rankings grow over time. Websites may launch with Organic rankings from page 2 and beyond. However, Paid Search can appear in position 1 on day one of their launch. For that reason, Paid Search can provide preliminary insight that can be applied to SEO’s strategy. By testing keywords in Paid Search, you can discover whether or not they’ll be good conversion drivers. These types of findings can help you identify keywords that are crucial to your SEO strategy.

Also, analyze top performing Paid Search ad copy to determine what CTA’s work best and utilize them when crafting or refining meta descriptions. Paid Search best-practices rotate 3-4 ads per ad group, which means you’ll be able to identify phrases that work well for particular keyword themes as well.

Using Organic to Optimize Paid Search

On the flip side, SEO insights can be optimized to improve Paid Search performance. Identify Paid Search keywords with low Quality Score and work to improve them with on-site SEO tactics such as better on-page keyword optimization or creating keyword-targeted subpages. Optimizations such as these signal higher keyword/content relevancy ratios to search engines.

Additionally, Paid Search terms that are expensive, but essential, can be made SEO priorities. Gaining traffic from these types of keywords will take time and effort. But, if you put a strategic roadmap in place and optimize accordingly, you’ll eventually reap the benefit of free, Organic traffic.

Taking a Holistic Approach to Paid & Organic Search

Managing Paid Search and SEO in individual silos is detrimental to performance. By making them work together, you’ll be able to leverage their learnings and achieve optimal performance.

How New Voice Search Options Are Affecting SEO Practices

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As of 2015, over half of the U.S. teens & 41% of U.S. adults use voice search on a daily basis, while it continues to grow daily. Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa are all “digital assistant” voice search platforms that are changing the search landscape.

Voice search is going to change your SEO strategy. However, you can capitalize on this growing trend & advance with a refined SEO strategy.

For voice search, take into consideration the following SEO techniques:

[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”2/3″ css=”.vc_custom_1489719845743{margin-top: 35px !important;}”][vc_custom_heading text=”1. Focus on Conversational Queries” font_container=”tag:h2|font_size:22px|text_align:left|color:%23333333″ use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_column_text]Conversational search & voice understanding, not only voice recognition, is the future. Conversational search queries give us a much higher chance to predict searcher intent. To answer natural language questions correctly, you need to work on your long-tail keywords. While short tail keywords won’t disappear entirely, they do become far less relevant considering the natural phrases used in voice search.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″ css=”.vc_custom_1489719851024{margin-top: 35px !important;}”][vc_single_image source=”external_link” onclick=”custom_link” img_link_target=”_blank” link=”https://moz.com/blog/how-voice-search-will-change-digital-marketing-for-the-better” custom_src=”https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Siri-780×439.jpg”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner css=”.vc_custom_1489719851024{margin-top: 35px !important;}”][vc_custom_heading text=”2. Provide Context with Schema Markup” font_container=”tag:h2|font_size:22px|text_align:left|color:%23333333″ use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1552242806405{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]

Simply put, schema makes voice search better. Schema data, or structured markup data, was created to improve user experience in SERP results & helps Google algorithms better understand and index your data. It only makes sense that search engines would rely heavily on this type of extra information when determining what people mean by the semantic language voice search encourages.

To ensure your company’s web pages are presented to users in current & future voice search iterations, schema markup will become increasingly important in helping the engines understand your site & how it should be ranked.

The volume of rich answers appearing in search results has nearly doubled from 2014 to 2016 so it’s time to familiarize yourself with schema markup & get started using schema data!

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Make the search experience quicker by Implementing a FAQ or Q&A page to your site. This is a great way to add natural language to your website. Scour your search query reports & analytics for natural language queries. This can give you a good idea of what keywords users are already using and help to alter your strategy targeting more conversational keywords in the future.

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Voice search doesn’t mean you have to overhaul your entire SEO strategy, but you are going to need to make a few changes that will help you be successful in the voice search world. The goal for voice search in 2017 is to go above and beyond voice recognition and evolve into voice understanding.

Need help optimizing for voice search?
WE’RE THE GUYS TO HELP![/vc_column_text][mk_button dimension=”flat” size=”large” url=”https://decantery.com/contact-us/”]Contact Us[/mk_button][/vc_column][/vc_row]