I think most people will look at the title of this article and scratch their head. So, let me clarify my statement.

In general, digital marketing is a very lucrative industry. Close to 120 billion was spent in 2020. So how could the internet have possibly destroyed the subject of marketing.

Did you know that Fortune 500 companies spent approximately 75% of that 120 Billion. Leaving around 30 Billion for the rest of the 32.5 million companies in the United States. If you average that out per company, it is less than $1000 per company.

internet marketing tampa

When going through the internet you see Fortune 500 hundred companies dominating. They own almost all top paid and organic spots in the search engine results pages.

The Fortune 500 companies rule social media for their industries and pretty much any other form of digital marketing you can find.

Small businesses fail and they fail at alarming rates. 20% in the first year, 30% in the second year and by the fifth year that number is 50%. And the number 1 reason for failure “Not using marketing”.

When you look on the internet and social media there are success stories at every turn of how “Joe Blow” from nowhere turned his small business into a million dollar going concern overnight; and every business can do the same thing.

internet marketing tampa

Granted there have been some businesses that have probably accomplished exactly what they have promoted. That number is approximately 1%.

The other 99% spent years working to make a successful business, and some of that 99% are just pretending to be successful businesses to make a buck off whoever will listen.

Small businesses owners all over the country try to be that 1% and 99% of them fail.

It isn’t for lack of trying. Small business owners are the hardest working people on earth. The vast majority of them give their heart and soul to their clients and their employees.

20 years ago, unless you were a Fortune 500 company, and could pay for TV ads, Radio Ads, Print Ads and national campaigns, all you had to worry about was the newspaper and if your advertisement was closer to the front than your competitors.

Now small businesses have to worry about a business 3 states over that can be found on the search engine result pages ahead of them. When their business is just down the street.

Business owners have been misled. Marketing takes work, it is not instant success. It is built up over time through consistent work that spans the entire company. Years, not weeks or months.

The average lifespan of a Director of Marketing in a business is 6 months. The average time a business owner gives a marketing company is 3 months.

So instead of business owners understanding that marketing is a long term investment based on consistent actions that bring about exact results over a long period of time, they expect miraculous results in 3 months and they believe this is possible because they can find it all over the internet.

internet marketing

The internet is a marvelous tool and every marketer’s dream come true, but it is also their worst nightmare. It is a double edged sword.

The internet needs to stop misleading business owners. More marketers need to come out and explain the truth. Content needs to be made everywhere. Online courses need to start teaching the axioms of marketing and not the next new craze.

Marketing companies shouldn’t be more worried about the next client they signed up and how big the plan is; than they are of the results they delivered to their client.

Marketers should be the trusted advisor, the people business owners turn to, to help them expand their businesses and make the well thought of. Marketing companies should be helping businesses increase sales, not lose profit because they paid too much for something they can’t even understand.

Local and Small businesses need marketing more than medium and large businesses, even if they don’t even know it.

So what can a marketing company actually do for a local or small business?

online marketing company

This will by no means be everything a marketing company can do for you, but they are key factors that can help a local or small business.

Ecommerce website – In 2021 an ecommerce website could be what saves your business from closing its doors.

If a business can’t have its doors open to in store public, it can still have its doors open online.

When a business has an ecommerce website online not only can you reach your regular customers, you can now reach customers you never could have before. The potential is limitless.

As a business owner, keeping up with an ecommerce website can be a pain in the you know what, having a competent marketing company to handle this for you can be extremely beneficial.

Managing Local Your Presence – As a local or small business you most likely aren’t worrying about customers in another state or even someone 100 miles out from where you business is.

You want to show up local. But do you really know what that takes? Do you even know how to show up local?

There are a tremendous amount of factors that are involved and if done properly can take over 600 hours a year for a business to keep up with it.

Most local or small businesses owners I know don’t have an extra 600 hours a year to dedicate to being found locally.

That is where a marketing company can come in. They can ensure your business listings are being properly displayed.

They can keep your Google My Business page up to date. They can ensure you have the appropriate locational keywords put into your website.

They can make sure that your website looks good on mobile devices and that loading times are what they should be for the best results.

The list can go on and on, but it all needs to be done.

Online Reputation – If your business has less than a 3.5 review score it is going to be A LOT harder.

95% of people who are looking for products or services online will be checking out your online reputation. They want to know you can be trusted before they even talk with you.

Managing reviews from up to 10 different sources can be very time consuming. Just going to each platform, logging in, reviewing each review, giving the right response, etc can take hours out of each day.

Frankly I don’t know a local or small business that has the time to do this and generally you will find many unresponded reviews or reviews that got answer days, weeks and in some cases months after the review was left.

A marketing company can handle this for you. At the outset, exact responses to all forms of reviews can be established beforehand and while you are busy keeping your business running smoothly, your marketing company will be busy ensuring your online reputation is staying on point.

Social Media accounts – Whatever your opinion of social media, 79% of the United States population had a profile in 2019. Outside of Google, there is no better method of reaching people than social media.

Social Media can also be a very helpful tool for existing customers to keep in contact with a business.

There is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, etc. Posting to these platforms can take time. Coming with what to post takes time.

And if people do respond to a post, they expect some type of response within 30 minutes.

Most marketing companies have the bandwidth to deal with all this traffic and have systems in place to post to all these platforms at the same time.

So if you find this hard to keep up with, look into hiring a marketing company.

Getting Reviews – We have already discussed responding to any reviews that have been received, but ensuring that a company gets as many reviews as possible is just as important.

Ensuring that each client gets a request for a review and then following up to ensure that person actually leaves a review can take a lot of time that most businesses don’t have.

Marketing companies are set up with tools to help a business get this done. They will handle all aspects of this for you so that you can concentrate on other details for running your business.

Email Marketing – Staying in touch with your existing client base is important. It is 85% easier to sell a customer that has already purchased a product or taken a service with you, then it is getting a completely new client.

Most business owners I know don’t know how to set up email automations, how to create emails from different templates or email systems.

I know for a fact that if they put their mind to it, they could absolutely figure it out, but they are busy delivering to customers, hiring new staff, dealing with manufacturing problems, etc. There are a million details that go into running a business.

A marketing company can absolutely handle this for you. They know the technology, they understand design, they can write copy and they can make sure that you are staying in touch with your customer base.

online marketing company

As we discussed earlier, this is not everything that a marketing company can do for a business, but they are extremely important.

We understand that local and small businesses have many different obstacles they have to overcome on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis to just keep their doors open.

A marketing company should be doing everything possible to make their customers’ lives easier and these are just a few examples of how they can do that.

We hope that you have found the article useful. Please follow any of our social media accounts or subscribe to our blog to continue to get great articles such as this.

Small to Medium sized businesses account for 48% of the United States economy. They are the literal lifeblood of our country.

These businesses are constantly targeted by marketing companies of all shapes and sizes.

Every marketing company is looking for their share of the market. This alone has given marketing companies a bad reputation, but is this the real reason. No.

local business online reputation

The are two main reasons why marketing companies have bad reputations:

  1. Over promising on results and timing
  2. Not getting results with services being delivered

Is this because all marketing companies are bad? Are they just after money? Do they really know what they are doing?

No, not all marketing companies are bad. The vast majority are not after money. Most of them have some knowledge of the subject.

In this day and age, immediate results are expected. If you watch social media then I am sure all of you have run across people that became overnight successes. They went from making less than 100K a year to millionaires.

People see this and expect it for everything. Truth be told, these people are less than 0.5% of the population and most of them spent years getting to where they are now.

local business online reputation

Marketing isn’t overnight. Marketing is built over time through consistent actions to correct audiences that generate engagement and finally customers.

So here is what happens. Marketing companies know that search engine optimization works and they know it will help a company if they just do it. Most of them also know that it takes many months (over 6) if not years to get major results. Depending on the competitiveness of the industry.

So marketing companies over promise the results and the timing. They get the client and then 6 months down the road little or no results are gotten. Upsets are created and the marketing company loses a client and gets a bad reputation.

Paid advertising. This service is used by millions of businesses each and every day. But here’s the rub. On every search engine results page there are only 8 paid advertising spots per page. That means in every industry there are only 8 different companies that can occupy these spots on page 1. There are other spots on different pages, but businesses don’t want those spots, as 95% of the internet will never go to page 2. On top of that, 87% of the internet bypass paid ads all together and go directly to the local or organic results.

If the above wasn’t bad enough, paid ads occur on a bidding system. Meaning, whoever bids the most amount of money and is the most relevant for a keyword will always take the top spot. Meaning bigger companies with more financial resources will always be able to pay more money for the ads, leaving local and smaller businesses will have less chance of succeeding with paid advertising.

So what happens? Marketing companies know that paid advertising can work, and can have the possibility of getting immediate results. So they pitch a client on a specific budget that will allow them to compete on necessary keywords. Client sees the budget and bulks, but is willing to pay half the ad spend budget. The Marketing company accepts clients on a lower budget that can’t compete, doesn’t get any results and ends up with an upset client and a bad reputation.

We could list out almost every single aspect of marketing and give an understanding of why marketing companies have a bad reputation, but we think you get the point.

Marketing works. You can see the success of it on a daily basis with companies like Nike, Coke, Apple, etc, but guess what. They have had decades or marketing and spent billions to accomplish the results they currently have.

At Evolved we speak with local and small businesses on a daily basis and the overall consensus is that they know that they have to do marketing, but so far it hasn’t worked for them and they have spent thousands and thousands of dollars with no results.

Steps for Improvement

Browser Caching

A cache is a secondary memory storage space on a computer.

Meaning browsers will store specific files on your local computer from different website pages.

Website Pages share many different resource files and when these are cached on your computer it helps to load some website pages faster.

If you can leverage browser caches, this can help you to speed up loading time.

Images

The larger the size of images on your website, the longer it will take to load your website. Period.

The best file types to use for a website is WebP. They compress the best. We highly recommend that you use this for your photos.

HTML, CSS & JavaScript

Websites in their simplicity are composed of code. And whether you realize it or not, there can be unnecessary code that is not needed for execution.

If you don’t know coding, we highly suggest that you hire a web developer to get this done. It doesn’t have to be a lot of work, but very necessary.

Server Response

Every website on the internet is located on a server somewhere in the world. If that server has a slow response to request from a browser, it can significantly slow down loading time.

A server should respond to a request from a browser in under 200 milliseconds. There are many different reasons for slow response – slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation or memory starvation.

These need to be inspected and handled as necessary to speed up server response.

Landing Page Redirects

Having too many redirects to a landing page can create a redirect loop that takes time to get through and to the actual page.

Just have one actual URL address for your landing pages.

We hope that you have found this article helpful. If you would like to continue to get articles such as this one, please follow any of our social media pages or subscribe to our blog.

local business online reputation

How does Evolved help these clients:

  1. We educate them on the subject of marketing.
  2. We educate them on the proper timing for their marketing strategy.
  3. If they are not willing to expect this time frame, then we do not accept them as a client (more marketing companies should do this)
  4. We explain the budget needed to get results. If they are unwilling to pay this budget then we either don’t accept them as a client, or explain what results they can expect for that budget.

For the industry to clean up its reputation, it needs to start giving clients real expectations and until such time as it does, it will continue to have a bad reputation.

We hope that you have found this article useful. If you would like to receive more information like this please follow any of our social media accounts or subscribe to our blog.

Have you ever visited a website that was extremely slow? What impression did this leave on you? Did you even stay on the website to find out the information that you wanted?

I’m sure you have been told that your website needs to be fast for search engine optimization. This is absolutely true information, having a fast website does assist with increasing your SEO score. But why?

It isn’t some esoteric technical reason. It isn’t because search engines make up new ways to increase the work of marketing companies. At the end of the day it is all about engagement. Every search engine is a business and they make more money when more and more people engage with their platform.

increase website speed

Thus, if you have a slow website it lowers engagement. Did you know that 50% of internet users expect a website page to load in 2 seconds or less? So, search engines decided to make it part of their algorithm.

How to determine your speed?

As we discussed above, search engines are all about engagement and part of Google’s engagement comes from all the different businesses using their platform.

Therefore they decided to make a few tools that businesses can use to measure their website speed.

Google PageSpeed Insight Tool

Google Analytics – Check out the Site speed reports

Why use Google’s tools? Why not use tools made by other companies? Simple answer. What do you think Google uses to rank your website? Google uses their own tools and so should you.

The information you get is also useful and if you do address the issues it will increase your website speed.

Additional Reasons for Speed

As discussed earlier in this article, the need for speed is about engagement, but let’s break this down even further.

The User Experience

In 2021 internet users want instant gratification. People don’t have the patience to wait for even 5 seconds for a website to load.

To ensure the user experience of your clients/customers or potential clients/customers coming to your website is enjoyable, the website speed is important.

The average internet usage today is just under 7 hours a day. If your website page is taking more than 3 seconds, that person will bounce off your website and find another that doesn’t take so long.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is incredibly important for every business. Having a slow website will lower your SEO score.

Conversions

This is pretty obvious. If someone doesn’t stay on your website because it is too slow, you will not get them to convert.

A website is a virtual representation of your company and slow websites leave bad impressions.

increase website speed

Steps for Improvement

Browser Caching

A cache is a secondary memory storage space on a computer.

Meaning browsers will store specific files on your local computer from different website pages.

Website Pages share many different resource files and when these are cached on your computer it helps to load some website pages faster.

If you can leverage browser caches, this can help you to speed up loading time.

Images

The larger the size of images on your website, the longer it will take to load your website. Period.

The best file types to use for a website is WebP. They compress the best. We highly recommend that you use this for your photos.

HTML, CSS & JavaScript

Websites in their simplicity are composed of code. And whether you realize it or not, there can be unnecessary code that is not needed for execution.

If you don’t know coding, we highly suggest that you hire a web developer to get this done. It doesn’t have to be a lot of work, but very necessary.

Server Response

Every website on the internet is located on a server somewhere in the world. If that server has a slow response to request from a browser, it can significantly slow down loading time.

A server should respond to a request from a browser in under 200 milliseconds. There are many different reasons for slow response – slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation or memory starvation.

These need to be inspected and handled as necessary to speed up server response.

Landing Page Redirects

Having too many redirects to a landing page can create a redirect loop that takes time to get through and to the actual page.

Just have one actual URL address for your landing pages.

We hope that you have found this article helpful. If you would like to continue to get articles such as this one, please follow any of our social media pages or subscribe to our blog.

We can not even begin to tell you how many websites we see on a weekly or monthly basis that don’t have an SSL certificate. It’s a lot.

I’m pretty sure that if I asked the average business owner, they would have no clue what an SSL certificate is, but they should.

ssl certificate services

So what is an SSL certificate?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. In english this means that someone invented and then developed software that will allow information to be shared on the internet in a secure fashion.

Example – Your business has a contact form on its website. The form requires a name, address, email address, phone number and maybe a short snippet of information. This information is sensitive.

As a business there are a multitude of reasons your business would want to keep this information secure.

  1. For the privacy of your potential client
  2. To protect your market share of the industry you were in

Without a SSL certificate, getting the names of people who fill out forms on your website is simple. A hacker could do it in a heartbeat. As a business this could be a huge liability.

Imagine a competitor wanted to find out every person filling out the contact forms on your website so they could steal them away. Without an SSL certificate this would be rather easy for them.

As you can see it is extremely important for a business to have an SSL certificate. And if this information hasn’t already convinced you that it is important, we’ll give you another reason.

In 2014, Google switched up its ranking algorithm (like they do all the time) to include the fact that websites need to have an SSL certificate. Meaning if your website doesn’t have a SSL certificate…it will harm a business Local and Organic Search Engine Optimization!

So let’s run down this quickly:

  1. It could cause you a lot of legal trouble
  2. Competitors could steal my clients
  3. It will have massive hit on my SEO rankings without an SSL certificate

So the answer is pretty cute and dry. Every business needs an SSL certificate. Period. Reach out to your web developer to ensure that your business does.

We hope you have found this article helpful. If you would like to continue to get articles such as these please follow any of our social accounts or subscribe to our blog.

ssl certificate services
In 2020 small businesses revolve around customer service. Small businesses do not have the luxury of giving bad customer service.

If one of their clients or customers gets bad service it can ruin their business, especially if that customer leaves a review online.

Therefore we thought it would be a good idea to give everyone the best practices for digital customer service. This will help to level the playing field between large corporations and small businesses.

digital marketing

The need for speed with your reviews:

While your business is the center of your life, that is not the case for your clients or customers. Whatever product or service they are using from your business it is generally a small aspect of their life.

So when they decide to take the time to leave a review, your business should give it the utmost attention. Regardless of whether the review is good or bad.

A bad review should be handled in 2 hours. A good review should be handled in 5 hours. Under no circumstances should any review go over 24 hours.

Walk your business’ Customer Journey

A lot of businesses have a customer journey, even if they don’t know it. They have bit and pieced it together since the inception of their business. Generally starting out with a website, then maybe a social account, they do a blog every few months, etc.

It is done whenever the business owner has time or possibly whenever they hire someone to handle their marketing.

Take on the viewpoint of a potential customer. They hear from a friend that they visited your store. They go on the internet to check your website…it hasn’t been updated in 3 years and it isn’t mobile friendly. So they leave that and go to the business’ Facebook page, only to find it hasn’t been updated in the last 6 months. Customers have left reviews on Google and Facebook, but the business hasn’t responded. Not a great customer journey is it.

As a business, walk through your own customer journey and see what the experience is like…and then make sure you fix anything that should be better.

Social Media isn’t just about posting content

The advent of social media changed the whole landscape of business reputation. It leveled the playing field and put the consumer at the forefront.

Gone are the days where businesses controlled the public’s perception of a company. With Social Media a business can receive real time feedback from their consumers or clients, even in store if they so desire.

Being on top of your social media accounts might seem like a pain, but the ability to interact with your consumers on this level has never existed. It gives every business an edge, if only they take the time to use it.

Ensure that your social media isn’t just a one-way communication.

 Your website must be a reflection of your business

In 2021 a business’ website is a reflection of that business. If you don’t leave a good impression immediately, people will just leave.

Nearly 50% of consumers expect a website page to load in less than 2 seconds and nearly half of all internet usage throughout the entire world is done on mobile devices.

When website visitors have a poor experience, they are not going to blame the WiFi or Google or any other search engine. They are going to blame the company.

Therefore your website needs to be FAST, it needs to be Engaging and it needs to be HELPFUL!

 Listings are how you are found

This might come as a surprise, but there are A LOT of places that your business can be listed.

GoogleFacebookYahoo
TwitterInstagramBing Maps
CitySearchGlassDoorindeed
Insider PagesTrip AdvisorYelp
FourSquareLinkedIn2FindLocal
411.com8couponsAB Local
AcompioAmericantownsBetter Business Bureau
BizwikiBrownBookCentral Index US
Chamber of CommerceCitySquaresCredibility Review
CylexDexKnowseLocal
Find OpenGoLocal 24/7Hotfrog
iGlobalJudy’s BookLa Voz
Local DatabaseLocal.comLocal Edge
LocalPages.comLocalSolutionLocalStack
MakeItLocal.comMantaMapQuest
Merchant CircleMy Local ServicesOpendi
Pages24PointComPublic Reputation
ShowmelocalSuperpagesTupalo
Us-info.comUSCityVoteForTheBest
Where To?YalwaYaSabe
Yellow BotYellow Pages DirectoryYellowMoxie.com
YellowPageCity.comYP.com 

There are 65 listing directories here and this is by no means all of them. Each one of these has to have the exact same name, address and phone number. There can be NO variations at all.

If a person goes to one listing directory and another directory says different it can create problems. Ensure they are all correct.

 The power of being positive

A business can never underestimate the power of a positive attitude. Especially when it comes to customer service.

Example 1 – I’m sorry, that feature is not part of our software currently.

Example 2 – That exact function is being worked on by our development team full time and will be available at the beginning of next month, as well a few other features you will find useful.

Which example do you feel is more positive. Just changing a few words in the language of your digital customer service can make all the difference.

digital marketing

Don’t just email for the hell of it

Business owners get bombarded with emails all day every day. I know many business owners that have two different accounts. One for all the spam and one for the actual emails they want to receive.

If you are going to email your clients, ensure you have something to say. The approach for sending out emails should be just to sell them. It can be a direct communication line to your customers and if properly used, can make their experience with your business great.

Make the emails timely. Meaning don’t send them an email everyday. Make them relevant and helpful. If it isn’t going to help that customer/client. Why send it at all. It’s a waste of money for you and time for them.

 Be Real

Of course clients/customers want the best product/service they can get and they generally want to have it for the best price, but you will be shocked how many will take authenticity over everything else.

They want to deal with a business that is going to give it to them straight, not give them the run around and never get the product or service they want.

We hope you have found this article helpful. If you would like to continue to get such articles please follow any of our social media accounts or subscribe to our blog.

Marketing might be one of the most misunderstood subjects in the business world today.

Marketing is defined on Google as “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”.

The definition of a word should give a person a full conceptual understanding of that word. If a meaning of a word does not give the full conception of a word, you will find people unable to properly accomplish the word itself.

online marketing tampa

If we break down the above definition given by Google word for word, it does not give the correct concept of what marketing is.

Based on Google’s definition all you need to do is promote a product or service to get sales. It should have some market research and advertising.

Sounds incredibly simple. Every business should be booming based on the above definition since every business does exactly what Google states.

Unfortunately this is not the case. In the first year 20% of small businesses fail. By the second year that number has risen to 30% and by year 5 that number has increased to 50%.

strategic internet marketing services

In an article written by Inc.com called “The Top 5 Reasons Small Businesses Fail” the #1 reason is “Failure to market online”.

These two datums don’t make sense. Google says all you have to do is promote your product or service online to get sales, but the #1 reason small businesses fail is “Failure to market online”.

How is this possible? In the year 2021 small businesses know that they need to market online and generally do, but still we have failing businesses.

What if what was being done by most small businesses as “marketing” wasn’t really marketing. What if the woefully inadequate definition of “marketing” by Google directs people down a path that only gives 1 aspect of what marketing is, but not everything else that is needed for marketing.

Could that possibly answer the question as to why small businesses doing “marketing” are failing? It isn’t by any means the only answer, but it definitely is a major problem with “marketing” in the business world.

Here is a more comprehensive definition of marketing “the creating and packaging (physically or virtually) and moving a specific product/service into the correct publics hands. It is the preparation, the distribution and placing on the “market” in such a way as to obtain maximum exposure and compensation to the correct audience that will need or want the product or service”.

When looking at the above definition you can see a much clearer picture of what actually needs to take place to properly market.

Let us break this down ever further “the creating and packaging (physically or virtually)…

Before a product or service is even conceived, much less put into motion to produce, the marketing department should be doing surveys on the ideal clientele. So they can find pain points or points of reality and positioning that can be used for design of the product or service, copy, etc.

and moving a specific product/service into the correct publics hands”.

Distribution plays a massive role in marketing. Not only of the content, but the product or service itself. A person can release content forever, but if there is no product available for delivery or no person within the business to deliver the service, you create major upsets with your clientele and can actually create negative promotion for your business.

“…in such a way as to obtain maximum exposure and compensation to the correct audience that will need or want the product or service”.

Of course advertising is part of marketing. The basis of advertising is you have to attract, you have to interest and then and only then can you actually get a message across. If you don’t get the attention of someone, then you can never gain their interest and if you don’t have their interest, they will never get your message.

And to ensure it is working, you have to analyze everything about the marketing. Did the content get out? Did the sale people get the info packs? Did they use the info packs? What was the response to the content? What was the response to the product or service? Etc. From there you can keep a successful campaign running or adjust as necessary to make it a successful campaign.

Lastly, you can’t just shotgun it all out to everyone and hope it works. You have to release the content strategically. That’s part of effective marketing and it’s what brings about sales.

The above definition expands the entire responsibility of marketing from just figuring out how to best deploy your social media marketing or your keyword research.

Marketing is involved in the entire operation of a business. From before a client even finds out about a business to the point that that client is no longer using a product or service.

Every interaction with a client or a potential client is under the purview of marketing. How that interaction occurs is dependent upon marketing properly doing their job.  This doesn’t mean they are responsible for delivery.

With a basic understanding of the definition of marketing we can make inroads into handling the over situation of small businesses failing.

Hopefully you have found this article helpful. If you would like to continue to get articles such as this, please follow any of our social media accounts or subscribe to our blog.

I believe that if you spoke with just about any business owner they will tell you, building a new website is about the last thing they ever want to do.

Business owners aren’t employees. They live and breathe the business they own and they work damn hard to make sure it succeeds. For this reason they generally have “exact” ideas of how they want their website to look and feel and web design companies just don’t get it.

I know for a fact if you spoke to a web design company they will tell you that business owners don’t have a clue on how a website should look and feel.

As you can imagine, these can be fun times. Despite all this, websites keep being built day in and day out…and a lot of them incorrectly.

We thought we would give everyone a better idea of what it takes to have a good business website.

To be able to properly do this, one of the first things everyone needs to realize is a website isn’t for the business, it is for the PUBLIC. It is there to enlighten them on the business and how that business can help the PUBLIC solve their problems.

Here are the 5 essential foundations of every website:

  1. Display what clients your business services (this is to ensure that a person knows he came to the right website).
  2. Display the problems your clientele run into (the reason a person is coming to your website is due to having a problem or needing information your business hopefully can solve).
  3. Highlight how your business solves these problems (present the solution).
  4. Highlight your unique selling proposition (why should a potential customer/client choose your business over that of your competitors).
  5. The ability to acquire the identity of those who come to your website (to be able to further remarket to potential clients).

In addition to those foundations, there are some technical essentials for every website as well.

  1. Contact Information should be displayed in such a way to be easily seen on every possible page.
  2. Ensure that you give clear and product descriptions and you always keep the information up to date.
  3. Make sure that you have quick links to all your social media profiles
  4. Use video whenever possible as it will help conversions
  5. Ensure your website is built with responsive design (meaning it will look good on desktop and mobile, regardless of the device it is being looked at on).
  6. Ensure that you build the website so that it is FAST.

Hopefully these essentials will help your next website project run a little smoother.

Websites are important. They are the foundation of every digital marketing strategy and need to be done properly to ensure conversions can occur on the website.

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