YOUR WEBUPDATES.NET ULTIMATE BUSINESS MARKETING HACKS FOR LOCAL, Regional, AND GLOBAL VISIBILITY

Google, one of the foremost search engines in the world, allows you to target potential customers in your local area specifically with pay-per-click ads. With this platform, you can run classic search engine results in Google Ads, Google Local Services Ads, Google Shopping Ads, and more. 

A higher volume of inquiries and increased sales are just two of the many benefits of running Google Ads. A well-thought-out ad strategy can also yield long-term results that are less tangible, such as improved brand awareness and brand recognition, which often leads to referrals and sales down the road. 

Step 1: Create your locations

Let’s say you own a coffee shop in Irvine, CA, and let’s say that consumers are only willing to drive up to five miles to visit the store.

1. Go to settings at the campaign level > all settings > edit locations > advanced search > radius targeting.
2. Type in your address and select search.
3. Add locations for a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 mile radius.

Step 2: Collect data

The most important part of this Google Ads optimization strategy is using data to make your decisions. Now that the locations are placed in the campaign, you must give them time to collect clicks and more importantly, conversion data. Once your data reaches a significant level, you will then be able to perform the formula in step three and enter bid adjustments.

Step 3: Set location bid adjustments

A location bid adjustment is the percentage you would like to adjust your bids for a given location. You can set lower bids with negative numbers or raise bids with positive numbers.

To input these location bid adjustments, go to campaign settings > locations tab. Here you will see all of the radius locations that were just created in step one along with their performance data. You will notice a bid adjustment column (you will be using that one).

Here is the formula that you should use to create your bid adjustments for each location:

Location Conversion Rate / Average Conversion Rate – 1 = Bid Adjustment

Bid adjustment formula:
Location Conversion Rate / Average Conversion Rate – 1 = Bid Adjustment

An important thing to note is that bid adjustments will layer for a location within another location(s). For example, ads showing in the 1-mile radius will have the 2, 3, 4, and 5-mile radius bid adjustments added up. Here is an example of what actual bid adjustments will look like vs. the original adjustments that you will get from the formula above.

• Formula Bid Adjustments: 1 mile: 50%, 2 mile 35%, 3 mile 20%, 4 mile 10%, 5 mile 0%
• Actual Bid Adjustments: 1 mile: 15%, 2 mile 15%, 3 mile 10%, 4 mile 10%, 5 mile 0%

No conversion data? First off, shame on you! The best thing you can do is go with the assumption that the further someone is from your store, the less likely they are to visit. With that, don’t set a bid adjustment for your 1-mile radius, and gradually scale negative bid adjustments for 2, 3, 4 and 5 miles.

Running local Facebook ads in conjunction with Google Ads will even further facilitate sustained growth for your small business. Not only can social media ads increase sales; but they can also increase consumers’ familiarity with your business over time. As they scroll through their feeds and perform searches on Google and see your business more and more, when the time comes that they need your services, your business is likely to be the one they call. 

 Now, you’re not alone if you are asking yourself (or your agency) “Do you really believe our target market is on Facebook?” The answer is YES. Whether you are B2B or B2C, you are still advertising to people and frankly, people love consuming content on Facebook. 

As a local business, you have an advantage over national chains: They cannot, at scale, create hyper-local ads for each of their locations.

• Use Google Search Console to find new ad group opportunities based on what’s driving search impressions.
• Try including your Zip Code in the ad headline.
• Talk about distance to your location.
• Localize call outs and extensions.

Countless local businesses throw money down the drain by not tracking conversions or building local landing pages. Ideally, each of your Google Ads campaigns should have a simple flow chart:

Click Ad > Go to Relevant Landing Page > Convert

Each of your Google Ads campaigns should follow this simple flow chart:
Click Ad > Go to Relevant Landing Page > Convert

The key tips to keep in mind when developing a landing page for a local audience are:

• Include only one clear call to action.
• Use a descriptive hero image that compliments your value proposition.
• Answer your audience’s top questions to help them feel confident in moving forward.
• Make sure your contact number is click-to-call.
• Use sticky menus to keep important information and the CTA visible at all times.
• Test, test, test your local landing pages.

Receiving and responding to reviews is one of the best things you can do for your business. Customers love you! Unfortunately, their memory can be poor and sometimes they just don’t remember to leave you those coveted 5-star reviews.

1. Set up a confirmation or thank you page when people fill out a form or complete an event in your Google Analytics (GA).
2. Add a remarketing tracking code to your confirmation page and set up the list in GA so that you can tag customers who visit that URL.
3. Then you can create a simple display ad that says “Love us? Leave us a Review on Google! (Or the platform of your choice).

Ever wonder how you can cut through the noise among other Google Ads? Try talking in the third person. We have experimented and seen higher CTR’s in ad copy that contains language that speaks to the customer in the third person. Here are some examples:

• “We Hired Them To Do Our AC and It Was Perfect.”
• “They Truly Are OC’s Best Plumber”
• “I Am a Raving Fan After Their Customer Service. You Need to Try Them.”

By using language like this, your ad will immediately stand out from the competition and you can start to build up your CTR’s.

Our process is simple: Go to your Yelp or Google My Business account, read reviews from customers, copy and use in your Google Ads copy; and as always, test and re-test!

If you are a local service business driving sales through phone calls, and if landing pages aren’t really your thing (even though they should be…) then call-only ads could be a lifesaver.  

Call-only ads allow you to completely avoid the need for a landing page or a “leaky funnel.” If you do not have money for an ad team or custom landing pages, then call-only ads give you a way to advertise directly to your customer with a singular focus: customers and leads calling you.

Be wary though: you will get calls that are not entirely qualified, so make sure to leverage amazing ad copy that clearly allows your target market to self-identify with your offer.

Big picture, if you are a local business that thrives on foot traffic you want to start to create a correlation between your online presence and your physical location. You want to stand out in your advertising environment so that consumers, when driving or walking by your location, will think “Hey, I’ve seen that place before.” While copy like “Swing By Today” is catchy and needed, nothing ties the physical and the virtual together like a photo of your actual location. 

When creating your listing on these sites, be as detailed as possible, and make sure your information is consistent across listings. You want people to be able to use these sites to not only discover your business, but also to learn about, engage with, and become a customer of your business. If it is difficult for people to get to your website, find your address, or call you from your online directory listing, then you are likely missing out on new customers. 

Every year, Google improves its local search capabilities more and more. Consumers rely on this search engine to find businesses close to them. If you want to get found by customers in your local area, you need to make sure you’re showing up on Google Maps results as well as the local results section of Google Search. How do you do that? With a Google Business Profile, which is the official term for a Google business listing. This free listing will not only give you greater visibility in local search, but it will also help you to obtain more customers. This is because the listing contains everything a consumer needs in order to make a decision about and even engage with your business 

How important are listing categories, you might ask? They are critical—and here’s why. For one, if you advertise on Yelp, the queries that your ads show up for are determined by the categories you choose. 

Furthermore, where your listing ranks organically on Google is also influenced by your Yelp categories. For example, in the image below, Alternative Divorce Solutions was able to move up to the number one result in a Yelp search for “divorce mediation” simply by listing their business under “Divorce & Family Law” as a category.

The importance of this spans outside of Yelp though! Look at the number one organic result in Google (under local results, which we’ll get to next) for “divorce mediation”:  

Yep, it’s Yelp. But if you’re included in that list, you’re on the first page of Google. So, by simply getting your Yelp categories correct you can start to immediately impact your lead volume.

This also means that if you pay for ads and don’t want to advertise on certain keywords, removing categories is critical as well. (Think of this like negative keywords.)

Choosing a category is important for any listing, but especially your Google Business Profile. It’s also one of several optimizations you should do to improve the efficacy of your Google listing. Just as with ads and websites, Google ranks Business Profiles according to their relevancy to the search term and overall quality. This means that by optimizing your Business Profile, you can rank higher in local search, show up for more search terms, stand out from competitors, and even win more customers. To optimize your Google Business Profile, create a Google My Business account so you can access and manage the information in your listing. All of the attractive information you supply in your account dashboard will then populate in your Business Profile to boost its quality—and therefore your visibility in local search. 

Once you set up your directory listings, you can sit back and relax, right? Well, not quite. If there are any changes in your business, even as small as a suite number, you’ll need to update your listing. If people obtain inaccurate or out-of-date information about your business, they will not be able engage with it, and may even lose trust in your business. It’s also important to monitor your listings to respond to comments and reviews from customers. It’s a good idea to occasionally Google your business to make sure your listing is accurate. 

In addition to accessing your website and contacting you, potential customers will also use what other people say in order to learn about your business. If your business shows up in a directory and there are no reviews, they are likely to turn to a competitor who has reviews. Optimize your local online marketing by asking customers to write good online reviews for these directories and make it easy for them to do so. 

While it is essential to have a review strategy, there are some nuances around reviews to pay attention to for different platforms. For example, on Yelp, nothing is more irritating than reviews you rightfully earned going to the “not recommended” category or getting filtered out entirely.

• Do not send clients a direct link to your page. Yelp can see this and detect that you are asking for a review. Instead, have them type “[your business name] Yelp” into Google so they can arrive at the page organically.
• Do not send email blasts to large groups asking for reviews (a large injection of reviews raises alerts).
• Do not have clients review the company from your place of business (gets filtered if reviews are coming from the same IP address).
• Do not send invites through the “Find Friends” feature. Identify them with the feature then reach out on Facebook or email (personally) to ask for a review.

As a service-based business, you should have a unique service page for each of the core neighborhoods you serve. This way you can customize each page for the qualities, services, and traits specific to that location and each page will have a chance to rank organically for search queries like [your serivce] in [your location].

In addition, having the location-based pages in your top navigation, as with the example below, can improve your internal linking structure, which Google likes, which can in turn improve your rank. It also helps users to find the location most applicable to them more easily.

Crafting killer local pages is more of an art than a science. Beyond clarity and design, the relevance of the content on your page is hugely important. A great way to establish this relevance is by linking out.

Linking out to relevant local information is crucial in Google’s understanding of what you are associated with locally. To come up with ideas, we search: “city name + wikipedia” to come up with locally relevant ideas and talk about it in our page.

Here’s the basic template we follow:

1. Keyword + city in title
2. Talk about your history in the city and things you’ve been involved with in the community: link out.
3. Talk about relevant partners or associated businesses. If you are a plumber talk about the different suppliers you use in the area. If you are a coffee shop talk about the places you buy your beans from.
4. Talk about things that are relevant to what you do in your area. If you are a national lawyer, talk about the laws that are unique to that state.

The key is that your page is useful, relevant, and builds a local bond with your searcher.

Here’s a juicy stat from a BrightLocal consumer survey: 92% of consumers now read online reviews. We already know our customers want to read reviews. The key is to make these customer reviews more accessible, and a great way to do this is by incorporating them into your advertising. By leveraging Facebook advertising, you can quickly spread brand awareness and show off your stellar local reputation.  If you are struggling to get your images approved by Facebook, use this tool to test them. Then you can use this tool from Buffer for customizing your image and adding the text overlay. 

A lot of things may change, but one remains the same: people love free stuff! Therefore, a great way to attract locals to your business is to run a contest or giveaway. You could promote it through social media, email, your website, or even the local paper or a nearby radio station. To get people through your doors, you might even require in-store pickup or redemption. For example, you could use this model: “The first [number] customers to stop by today will get a free [product or service]!” 

Staying up-to-date with your customers’ conversations on social media can be tough if you run a local business with foot traffic.. To help you out, we came up with a way to automate social media for you. We made it simple for non-programmers like us and it only takes a Zapier and Twitter account to set it up. The idea is that if someone in your location tweets something with your brand or your product’s name in it that your own Twitter account can respond to them with a variety of responses. For full details on automating social media, click here!

Whenever you have an event, create a Facebook event for it and send out invitations. Hosting an event and making a Facebook event or even an ad for it will increase your event’s and business’s visibility and will help get more people interested in attending, as will Eventbrite. 

Another way to use Facebook to get local customers is with Facebook Groups. Search Facebook for local groups including business networking groups, industry related groups, or even parent or yard sale groups!  Joining groups that your target market is in and posting your content in them makes group members more likely to engage with your business. Just be careful not to only post your content. Show interest in others’ content, promote articles by other sources, and engage in two-way conversation. This is close to the #1 way of obtaining big ticket clients.

Social media is a great way to create a buzz about your business. In order to get local customers, use a location tag when posting. A location tag puts your business on the map, making it easier for local customers to find your business on Facebook or Instagram. 

An easy tool that you can use to attract more local customers is by using hashtags in addition to location tags on social media. When used correctly, you can engage local customers with your social media accounts and make your business more likely to be found by users browsing around. Use local hashtags for your city, state, or town. People searching and using local hashtags will be more likely to find your business this way.

In order to optimize your social media accounts for SEO, be sure to include your business’s name, website, and short description about what you do in your social media profiles. In terms of gaining local customers, adding your location on every social platform you use can help your business become even more visible to those in the area. Your location is just another keyword people can search for to put your business on the map.

Do you know a blogger or local influencer in your geographic or niche community whom people trust? Get to know that person or group of people and offer them a free service or product. Getting someone with strong local influence to try your business means that they might endorse your product to their followers. 

Could you sponsor a local sports team, hold a fundraiser for a local youth club or support some other project or organization? Doing so would put your business on the radars of people who are involved with (or at least aware of) those projects and organizations. This might just lead to more business for you. 

What if you’re not quite in a position to become a sponsor? You can still do some volunteer work within your community. No matter where you’re based, there’s surely something helpful you can do. You might consider helping out at local non-profit or charity event. This will give you the opportunity to meet and interact with locals and may also move the organizations you help to promote your business in some way. 

In many towns and cities across the country, community events are happening weekly. If your business is located in a metropolitan area, there are often craft and trade shows going on near you, too. Sign up for events you think your target audience will attend, and promote your business at these functions to the attendees. Local events draw local crowds, which can help your business gain more customers in the area. Be friendly, offer incentives for interacting with you and your business, and meet as many potential customers as you can. 

Make it a practice to network with local business owners. As you do, you’ll learn about their products and services, as well as their core values, mission, and customer base. If you find that their businesses complement yours and you’re targeting a similar demographic, a partnership might be worth considering.

You can then think of creative ways to promote one another’s businesses. This can be an effective way to go because you’ll have the credibility and good reputation of your partners working in your favor. Plus, their “vote of confidence” will give consumers all the more reason to trust and do business with you.

Local partnerships will have the credibility and good reputation of your partners working in your favor.

There are many resources available today for local business owners. Have you considered registering with your local chamber of commerce?  A chamber of commerce is one of many a sort of business network with a focus on furthering the interests of local businesses.

Regardless of whether you’ve heard of or considered joining this type of organization before now, one fact remains. You should register as soon as possible so you don’t miss out on any opportunities available to you as a member.

What a great way to do local content! Instead of just creating content that talks about yourself or is “for keywords,” start building useful, location-based guides. The example below is from a coffee shop, which helps to build their brand and help them be a part of their community.  With small budgets (like $20) we’ve been able to use promoted posts on Facebook to get massive reach and increase brand queries associated with their primary keyword: “coffee shop Irvine”. You and your team can do these exact same types of content.

Here’s a list of ideas to get you started:

• 10+ Dog Trails in (your city/county)
• Dates for Under $20 in (your city/county)
• Farmers’ Markets in (your city/county) That You Need to Visit This Weekend
• The Ultimate Guide To Craft Breweries in (your city/county)

Social media is huge, but that doesn’t mean that newspapers don’t still have a place in the world. If you have a local paper that people read, try advertising in it. Better yet, save the money and do something newsworthy. Tell the local paper about an event that you’re hosting and offer to provide inside access for a story! You could also ask to contribute a post useful to the community. 

Flyers aren’t just for yard sales and finding your missing pet—they are another quick and easy local marketing strategy that can help attract more local customers. Print out as many copies as you think you’ll need and hand them out in an area with a lot of potential customers. Local supermarkets, festivals, and sporting arenas are good locations for getting your local community to learn more about your business. 

Email is an effective way to keep in touch with past customers and gain new ones, especially for local businesses. Think about how you can make your emails more attention-grabbing with local content. You might try a monthly newsletter that also includes relevant updates about the community. Or maybe deals and discounts creatively named based on location-specific themes, such as street names or other community mainstays. You could also write free guides or blog posts with a local focus and distribute those via email. For example, a nutritionist could share a blog post on “Best Health Food Stores in the Chelmsford Area”, while a real estate agent could share a guide such as  “Best Resources for Boston Home Buyers”.

Think about how you can make your emails more attention-grabbing with local content.

Offline conversion tracking is a daunting task and can often rely on the dependence of micro conversions (time on site, specific page visits, etc.). Lucky for you, we have the answer to all of your offline conversion tracking pains: Emailed mobile coupons! This is a coupon that the consumer can request via email and show on their phone when it’s time to purchase at your store.  

Adding an emailed mobile coupon to your site is a great way to track both conversion intention and execution. You can add your paid traffic tracking script to the coupon request action to easily track purchase intention.

If you would like to take things one step further, build a custom landing page for this emailed mobile coupon and only show it to your paid traffic. That way, you can attribute all of your in-store transactions using the coupon to your paid efforts.

Word of mouth is also a highly effective local marketing tactic. The best thing you can do to promote word-of-mouth in your local area, of course, is to provide outstanding customer service. You should also be proactive by asking for reviews, in person, via email, or on social media.  One last idea is to package a solid offer up in a shareable email or social media post. If your audience members feel that someone they know could benefit as well, they’ll be happy to forward along to family and friends, increasing your business’s local exposure. 

Though we live in an online world, printed material is still widely successful with local marketing. Make sure your collateral is eye-catching, clearly explains briefly what you do or offer, and contains all necessary contact information. You can then set them out at your physical location, pass them out to potential customers and partners, or leave them in popular local go-to’s such as coffee shops.

These, too, will keep your business top of mind and may also end up in the hands of potential customers you previously hadn’t reached.

Kill two birds with one stone by offering referral incentives such as discounts and other coveted perks. Not only do they keep past customers coming back to you, but they also reel in new ones. Need we mention that these new customers—the family, friends and professional connections of current buyers—may also refer you, increasing your reach even more? This is, without a doubt, one of the most rewarding local marketing tactics you could use! 

If you are a local business, it can be difficult to tell if your online efforts are driving offline conversions. To help make your life easier, simply set your “get directions” page or tab as a destination URL goal in Google Analytics. With this type of data, you can build a somewhat reliable attribution model for your paid efforts.

More ideally, however, we recommend comparing advertising channel spends with overall revenue growth. So, when we spent $1,000 on Yelp compared to $500, how much more revenue did we make? Was it worth it? Start to notice trends and you can see where your dollar yields the greatest increase in marginal returns.

There are tons (and I mean tons) of observances and awareness causes that are allotted to specific months of the year. There’s Domestic Abuse Awareness Month, National Compliment Day, Financial Literacy Month, and the list goes on. These themes and observances give you the opportunity to add a touch of philanthropy, festiveness, and fun into your marketing content. Even better, you can really build a sense of community, which is huge for local businesses. The goal with all these local marketing ideas is that you are able to cut through the noise and stand out from your competitors. These creative advertising and marketing ideas should be tested and either put to rest or elevated into the hall of fame. 

Nowadays, technology is a rapidly developing and constantly changing field. Web standards shift yearly, dictating new tools and technologies for building a good website. What was trendy yesterday may not be next week.

The goal of any new tech stack for building a website is to make websites better, faster, simpler, lighter, and more secure. And suppose you upgrade your website to adopt these new technologies. In that case, you’ll be sure to provide your users with the best possible service and user experience that result in a good reputation and profits.

The bottom line here if it’s been a while since you’ve built your site, it might be the time to start looking for a new website design and a more modern template that is accompanied with the latest technologies.

This one might seem obvious, but after many years of working with multiple clients, we still feel compelled to point this out. If you make only minimal changes to your brand, you will either need to update your website or add a new section to reflect them. This will help you, among other things, to attract your visitors’ attention to these changes no matter big or small.

The dial is turned to eleven when you’re introducing major changes to your business strategy. Your website is ultimately the face of your brand and the first thing potential customers will notice about you and your business. So, it’s vital for this face to always be in sync with your business and send out a stunning first impression to all users.

Design trends change a lot more than you can imagine, and while there’s a certain “Je ne sais quoi” to appear old-school in some niches, being old and outdated isn’t the same as being old-school or going retro. If you don’t keep your eye on your design, you’ll start losing customers and stop attracting new ones as time progresses.

On the other hand, if you redesign a website for your business from time to time, especially when the current trends are relevant to your business, let’s just say you are giving your website a new decoration every Christmas, Halloween, etc. You are sure to pull in new customers even those who were “just passing by.”

With that said, perfect designs aren’t only about color themes and shapes. Although global preferences change in these directions as well, website design is about so much more. For example, in recent years, the designers at webupdates.com have been heading towards the uncluttering route, reflected in our own website designs for the clients:

• Cleaner and more straightforward websites that work seamlessly between all devices and screens are all the rage right now.
• Motion UI is also gaining more and more traction.
• Ensure all your content is consistent, including colors, fonts, and icons.

“Time is of the essence.” I guess by now, everyone understands what that means. No one will stay or have enough patience to remain on a website that takes ages to lead. In fact, slow loading speed is the number one contributing factor that would result in a high bounce rate. Update your site today.

Many things affect page loading speed. One of them is, of course, the way the page is coded, to be more specific: heavy, unoptimized images, underpowered hosting, and even an old, poorly performing theme. Other causes include cluttered UIs, and an overabundance of unnecessary or unoptimized links can also be a nuisance if left unchecked. If you check out the latest trends in web development technology, you’ll see that a great deal of them are aimed at making pages load faster. Website updates that employ new technologies can lower your website’s bounce rate and improve your SEO ranking.

Aim for a loading time of under 4 seconds. If you’re unsure how quickly your site loads, use tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix, or the more popular Page Speed Insight to check how long it takes for your site to load and which files or elements on the site are the troublemakers. Poor testing results mean you will have some work to do in order to improve performance.

It’s all about data safety nowadays. Users’ personal and financial information is often digitalized and stored on website servers. For example, your medical history is likely stored on the servers of your healthcare provider. Outdated security measures will more than often be under threat by hackers. That’s why Blockchain Technology is all the rage these days since your information is yours and yours alone.

Moreover, all the user data contained in it will be compromised. They can even be stolen if you don’t keep up with the newest means of data protection. Regularly updating your website and content management system (CMS) is necessary. If your website uses custom-built security, see that it’s compliant with the latest standards on the market. Update your site today.

If your website doesn’t have a mobile version or isn’t mobile responsive, you can just throw it right away and start making a new one. According to Statista, in 2021, Mobile accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. In the second quarter of 2022, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 58.99 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017 before permanently surpassing it in 2020.

Granted, in some countries, this number will be lower. But it will be much higher in others, for example, developed countries. This trend has led to what we now call mobile-first website development. As the name suggests, it’s when websites are created for Mobile initially and with the User Experience optimized for Mobile Users and are later adopted to desktop browsers.

Even if you have a separate mobile app, your website needs to adapt to mobile screens; otherwise, you face the fact of losing potential customers. If your business has been around for some time and your website is several years old, be expect to optimize it for Mobile ASAP. Since old technology didn’t allow for mobile optimization, old sites may be displayed incorrectly on mobile devices with a variety of screen sizes and resolutions.

Let’s start with the basics. Do you have a blog? Well, you should, as it’s a powerful marketing tool for SEO to drive more traffic and users to your website through keywords, internal links, and backlinks.

Google’s search engines or any other search engines love good, updated content. Every time you make an update to your site, Google and other search engines crawl and index your pages. Thus your site ranking gets recalculated. If you keep your content updated and of good quality that is made for SEO purposes, you increase your chances of getting noticed on Search Result pages. Pair that with a charming, good-looking website, and you’re guaranteed more attention.

But then again, when should you update your websites for SEO? Well, major changes to Google’s search engine algorithms happen approximately every half a year, so you can start with tracking those. But smaller changes to Google’s algorithms can happen at any time. Sometimes, we see iterations every couple of weeks; other times, there are several months of calmness before the storm.

Changes in search algorithms can affect your website’s ranking in search results, so it’s important to refresh your website regularly if you want to rank higher than your competitors. And it’s challenging to comply with all the new demands of search engines if you’re using older technologies. Update your site today.

At the same time, when you think about the importance of updating website content, it’s essential to consider the quality of content and your SEO strategy. Regularly updated but poor content will result in the fastest downfall, both with the visitors and with search engines – for example, Google’s Panda algorithm can lower the rankings of websites in search results for keyword stuffing (overloading text with keywords that lack proper context) and for low-quality or repeated content. There is no saying that you won’t be penalized for using tricks which are often called “Black hat” in SEO.

Google’s algorithms have been particularly demanding regarding the quality of content. Enough so that the company has created principles for websites to comply with if they want to keep high rankings in search results:

• Beneficial purpose – Websites should be created with users’ interests in mind.
• E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) – Websites should be trustworthy, and the content and site itself should present relevant expertise. If there’s anything that seems too sketchy or potentially harmful, Google will lower the site’s ranking.
• YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) – Content that touches upon information that can impact big decisions among readers (news, medical and financial advice, legal advice, etc.) must be written by professionals within the given field.

There is an abundance of plugins and third-party web apps that can be integrated into a website today to enhance its performance or to better engage with the users. For example, it is always beneficial to add more pop up and call-to-action at the right time and the right place that would increase your chance of a successful conversion. And one of the major reasons to redesign your website is to add such plugins. We have listed a few examples of possible integrations for your outdated or future modern website:

• Social media
• Google Analytics
• Banners
• Payment gateways
• Reservation/booking systems
• E-commerce plugins
• Content management systems
• Photo Editing App

Adding plugins also sometimes means updating your code, design, and technologies to make the website work seamlessly. It does sound like a lot of work, right? But a necessary step if you wish to stay ahead of your competitors (or at the very least not lag behind anyone).

This is extremely important. Just imagine! You’ve been pouring your heart and time into creating meaningful content for SEO and marketing that brings a lot of traffic to your website. Yet the second they access your homepage (or any other page), they bounce right off of it – then you have a major problem of losing leads and potential clients. Update your site today.

A high bounce rate indicates that you’re doing something wrong, either with content, the navigation of your website which is also the tenth reason on our list, or the overall look and feel of your site. On average, a bounce rate between 40 – 70% is considered OK (keep in mind that this varies depending on your industry).

Usability, or User Experience (Front End Development), is the art of making your website simple, user-friendly, and above all, easy to use. Understanding your customer’s online behavior gives you insight into what works and doesn’t.

No one would want to spend time on a website that takes ages to learn how to use. Make it simple and effortless for your users so they will stay; make it difficult, and they will leave at first sight of something hard. Some of the most basic and proven usability tips include proper use of taglines, intuitive navigation, and concise content, and strategic use of visuals.

• Avoid confusing features or functionality.
• Do links and buttons appear clickable, as they should?
• Does the website flow logically?
• Is it abundantly clear where important information can be found? If not, your website has not been designed for usability. Update your site today.