How Social Media Drives the Perception of Service in the Medical and Healthcare Industry

At first glance, healthcare and social media wouldn’t seem to mix well together. Medicine is one of those old, august professions, like law, full of Latinate terms and suggestive of stern erudition. Social media, meanwhile, often resembles a game of three-year-old soccer—an anything-goes melee of quite public mud-wrestles and high-pitched screaming. Plus, isn’t healthcare full of HIPAA and compliance issues and regulatory matters concerning privacy? If you livestream an open-heart surgery on Instagram, couldn’t you get sued?

The answer to that is yes. Do not livestream an open-heart surgery on Instagram. With that said, medicine is a pretty tech-savvy field. Think eMAR. Think telehealth. Think VR headsets that patients use to overcome motor deficiencies. So calm your qualms: Social media marketing can help providers reach more patients and act as leaders during a health crisis. Fact-check your messaging and observe industry rules about sharing patient data, and you can turn those puckish platforms into loudspeakers for the public good. Here’s how.

Keep People Informed

We’re still living through what may be the deadliest global pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu: COVID-19. For the past year and a half, most of us have checked our social feeds every day for any number of updates—the latest CDC guidelines, takeaways from our governor’s press conference, stats on deaths and infections regionally, nationally, globally. One of the dangers of social media is that it can foster misinformation, and make no mistake, the internet is awash with health tips that are patently false. But reputable social media accounts, like the WHO or Johns Hopkins or your local hospital, can provide much-needed advisories on public health matters such as COVID, ebola, a particularly infectious flu season, and so on.

Companies use social media to grab an audience’s attention, but medical marketing can often work in the opposite direction: People seeking insights from life science professionals about imminent threats. As of January 2021, 53% of US adults reported that they get their news “often” or “sometimes” from social media—which provides the added bonus of being able to keep up with the minute-by-minute, exponential pace of viral outbreaks. Health authorities, then, should use their social accounts to announce updates with the data and transparency needed to navigate through an emergency. A few digital DEFCON tactics to consider:

  • Integrate a chat box function into your site to help people work through any problems they’re experiencing.
  • Publish a Q&A section on your site. (No matter how many insights you give people about COVID, they’ll still have questions.)
  • Ask your social team to reply to comments that users leave on your posts so that you can dispel baseless screeds and route people to fact-based, objective resources. (Yes, such things still exist.)

Striking up a dialog with your audience in times of distress won’t just boost your social metrics—it’ll provide a sense of clarity that transcends a transaction. After all, what better way to earn people’s trust than to resolve issues about their health and wellbeing?

Interact with Patients

Health organizations can use their social media to keep the public apprised of pollution levels, disease risks, transmission rates, and so on. But they can also use their social platforms to maintain a dialog with patients about their individual health concerns.

Facebook, for one, lets users create what’s known as a “secret group”—which, yes, has a comical, double-secret-probation ring to it, but which is actually quite useful, as it provides its members with one degree of privacy deeper than a Facebook “closed group.” These secret groups are hidden from trolls and roboscammers. You can’t search for them or request to join them. To get in, someone has to invite you, and all the content shared inside it is visible only to its members, making it the perfect digital round table to host discussions between, say, hundreds of people who may have been treated for Crohn’s and colitis at the same hospital.

Caregivers and physicians can use these secret groups to share links to the latest research on Crohn’s, recommend nutrition tips and treatment advice, analyze environmental triggers, or give their professional opinion on episodes or flare-ups that different members may be battling through at the moment. These groups aren’t meant to be substitutes for regular appointments. Instead, they can operate as an ongoing panel where patients and physicians stay connected, lowering the possibility that someone in need of medical advice can’t get it in time.

Make Your Services More Accessible

Healthcare is a sprawling enterprise in the US, employing 11% of US workers and accounting for nearly one-quarter of government spending. With all the money flowing through this sector, it’s no surprise that it’s maddeningly complex. Getting a doctor’s appointment is difficult. Deconstructing an insurance policy requires a law degree. Keeping the differences between payer, prescriber, pharma, and PBM straight is beyond the ken of most mortals. 

Nothing about the medical landscape in this country screams “easy to access”—yet social media bills itself as the easy-to-access interface with the world. So how do you pair a speedy function with a cumbersome form? You post content that lets patients access your services no matter which stage of the funnel they’re in.

Again, imagine that your clinic specializes in treating Crohn’s and colitis. Post content that builds a relationship with people diagnosed with Crohn’s who are still in the awareness stage. Share research and link to articles about Crohn’s for other people who are familiar with you (and, therefore, deeper in your funnel). Offer resources for them to connect with you in case they want to switch doctors or need a second opinion about whether they should undergo surgery. Set up your life science marketing strategy to clear hurdles for them. Patients will love you for simplifying the escalating intricacies of healthcare—especially since contacting most providers nowadays is as straightforward as calling the Pentagon.

Change the Perception of Health

We’ll admit it: Advertising can be an unlikeable field, especially when it tricks consumers into funnels that are exploitative or unethical. (Payday scams or pitches for harmful herbicides or attempts to gloss over data breaches all spring to mind.) Yet advertising can also reshape our norms for the better. MADD (“Mothers Against Drunk Driving”) started as a grassroots organization in the 1970s, but through decades-long campaign work, they’ve changed how we view drinking. Pre-MADD, bartenders overserved without compunction, people wheeled their way home from their neighborhood tavern cheerfully snockered, and none of your buddies even had the vocabulary to say, “Who’s the DD tonight?”

Granted, MADD’s ads can be a touch shamey and Prohibitionesque, but they still altered how we behaved at the bar and helped create the Uber-home world we live in today. Leaders and brands can take a cue from MADD’s mad success and urge people to lead healthier lifestyles. Take Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative, or United Healthcare’s “Step Up for Summer” pledge to get enough sleep, walk 10,000 steps a day, and eat more fruits and veggies. What’s social media’s role in all this? Serving as the open-air forum where we raise awareness about breast cancer, make sexual health a comfortable conversation, share stories from a global community of patients—the list of potential campaigns is endless.

Advocate for Your Constituents

Yes, the idea of a company that champions a social cause is very much in vogue these days, but fear not: We’re not advocating that you advocate for a polarizing issue and forever hold the high ground. Yet we are aware that health organizations are often quite involved in the communities around them, so use your preferred platform to talk to those communities:

  • Give out the address of nearby needle exchanges. 
  • Combat misinformation about opioid abuse or pain medication management. 
  • Link to webinars that educate the public about a given topic—anything from the efficacy of mask-wearing to Lamaze classes. 

Consider the demographics of the region that you’re in and post health-related content that the people who you care for most frequently would benefit from.

Stay Compliant

Despite everything that we’re saying about the miracles of social media in healthcare, we still want to stress the importance of the regulations that buttress that industry. Know your HIPAA, but also follow your FDA, because that agency will review your social posts and they will send you warning letters if, for example, you’re touting drugs that have not yet been approved. 

That sounds like a simple enough fix: Don’t advertise unapproved drugs. But social media moves quickly, content creators most likely aren’t versed in the FD&C Act, and mistakes happen. To minimize mistakes, pass any posts that you’re unsure about by the lawyers. You may not want attorneys running your Snapchat account, but it is useful to have some knowledgeable staffer in-house who can steer your social strategy through the galaxy of regulations in healthcare—as well as through the health content terms of service for each social platform that you’re using.

And since this is such a sensitive field, monitor the comments that users leave on your social media. False claims, malicious statements, or descriptions that might breach someone’s privacy can all raise compliance issues. Lean on your legal team to advise you here, and use an app like Hootsuite’s Social Safeguard, which lets you upload the policies that you have to abide by and filter your posts through its auditing software.

Partner with the Pros

Ah, social media—the kiss-and-tell darling of the digital era, the funhouse mirror that we all use to show off everything from muffin recipes to our vacay in St. Lucia to our uninhibited willingness to duke it out with total strangers over whether Jordan or LeBron is the GOAT. (LeBron, duh.) According to data from Salesforce, social media is the most popular method for consumers to engage with brands, and social ads happen to be relatively cheap these days. So what’s our diagnosis? If you’re in the medical and healthcare industry, treat yourself to the wonders of social media.

Here’s our only caveat: Don’t use social media to make medicine cool. Don’t pressure some emeritus surgeon into TikTok’ing, well, anything (unless s/he’s an avid choreographer on the side). Don’t compromise your institution’s professionalism for a marketing ploy. Conversely, don’t churn out content if it’s not your specialty, because a lot of healthcare social feels sterile. (There, we said it.) All of the tips that we’ve recommended can help you turn prospects into patients. But, first, talk to a social media agency that’s worked with medical pioneers before—and knows how to bring your brand to life.

eCommerce SEO Best Practices

Cat massage combs, thumb pianos, bike desks, temporary tattoos, LED lightsaber chopsticks—you can buy nearly anything online, but the reason that eCommerce is becoming an enduring feature of global business may be that what digital shoppers are really purchasing is convenience. Ecommerce gives you the option of tapping an app and watching your order arrive the next day rather than battling through traffic and jostling inside a store only to discover that they’ve sold out of the Bob Ross Chia Pet you were looking for. No wonder worldwide eCommerce is expected to top $27.15 trillion by 2027, or that entrepreneurs have launched over 12–24 million eCommerce sites—a figure that’s only forecasted to grow in the coming years.

But here’s an inconvenient truth (for online merchants): Anyone with an eCommerce account is now jostling with 12–24 million competitors for VIP placement in the search rankings. Amazon and Alibaba don’t have to fret about how their customers will find them, but unless you’ve built a ubiquitous multibillion-dollar business with ironclad brand awareness, you need to implement SEO marketing best practices to lure users into your sales funnel. Granted, you can pay your way to the top of the search results, but paid media can get costly, and anyone with deeper pockets can outbid you. Plus, according to data from 2019, 41% of site traffic comes from organic search. So here are some tips on how to send the right signals to search engines that’ll get your eCommerce platform noticed.

Know Your User

As you identify your target audience, keep in mind that they could live anywhere. Today China has about 792.5 million online shoppers (or about one-third of all digital buyers). The US ranks second in annual online sales, but oceans of money are also pouring through eCommerce markets in Japan, Russia, France, and Brazil, to name a few, and you can position products and services to attract customers in those countries. Premium shapewear, Zoom piano lessons, tickets for cruises down the Rhine, education courses (ESL, or Mandarin as a second language)—if you’ve got these goods, anyone from Patagonia to Paris might be clicking onto your site. Your first order of business is to track which regions of the world your audience is coming from.

If the clientele that you’re attracting is primarily Spanish, consider adding some Castellano into your web copy. Or listing prices in Euros. Or measurements in metric. Your goal here is to make your site clear and intuitive for your users—whoever (and wherever) they are—to lower your bounce rate. Never forget how important that metric is: A low bounce rate tells search engines that people are lingering on your site because it’s useful for them. In turn, those search engines should reward you with higher SERP rankings, which means you’ve got a shot at your users taking the time to leave you a review. And on that note …

Encourage Reviews

You’re an entrepreneur. You’ve spent 100+ hours a week for years launching your business—courting investors, assembling a team, absorbing criticism and fine-tuning your operations. And now you’re supposed to open yourself up to the legendary vituperation of the public, who may unload on you because of a five-minute delay or an undercooked burger?

We get it—online reviews can be brutal. But a company without a review is like a dating profile without a headshot: Weird. People trust reviews, so much so that 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business, and people are likely to spend much more on companies with “excellent reviews.” Negative reviews are just as persuasive. According to some studies, 87% of shoppers won’t consider spending their money at a business with 1- or 2-star ratings.

So ask your customers (as well as your employees) to leave you a review, and shell out some money to promote the best ones. Rest assured that someone out there will leave the occasional snitty comment. That’s okay. Respond to it. Demonstrate that you understand this person’s concerns and you appreciate their feedback. So long as you come across as down-to-earth and interested in finding a solution, you’ll generate organic PR buzz and encourage even more reviews, and here’s the kicker: In raving about you as “the best platform to find trending products,” customers are writing in long-tail keywords for you. Layers of reviews can potentially generate duplicate content—which Google will rap your knuckles for—but enough engagement with your site should also grab the search engines’ attention.

Unclutter Your URLs

By this point, you’re probably seeing a pattern: To optimize for search engines, make your content clear and uncomplicated. That rule applies to web copy, alt text, your site architecture (as we’ll find out), and, yes, your URLs. Write URLs with keywords that are describing what the page is about. Here’s an example of a bad URL for the page that you’re on now:

https://www.jacobtyler.com/567?/blog?=1230987/main.html

That URL will seem as opaque to a search engine as it does to you. Sure, “Jacob Tyler” and “blog” indicate what users will find on this page, but the string of numbers consign your content to the slush pile of uncrawlable web pages. Now look at the URL that we’re actually using for this blog:

https://www.jacobtyler.com/ecommerce-seo-best-practices/

See what we did there? We added in target keywords and separated them, kept the phrasing pithy, and wrote everything in lower-case—all of which adds up to an SEO-friendly URL. Find out whether the CMS that your site’s running on generates its own URLs (which usually look like impenetrable code), and if so, tinker with them until they’re readable and descriptive.

Optimize Your Pages

Think of your eCommerce site as the digital version of an in-store experience. A room in the mall with a pile of shoes dumped on the floor is probably not going to net as much revenue as a shop that invested in gleaming countertops and shelves with prices and descriptions next to each sneaker. Let’s say that you’re selling shoes online. Bring every single shoe into focus with some of these web strategies:

  • Describe each one with long-tail, transactional keywords.
    Add those keywords into each page’s URL, and into title tags and meta descriptions.
  • Pair images—distinct, professional images, preferably with a few angles—with products, and rewrite the file name of those images to be as clear as the page’s URL. (As in, swap “IMG00934.jpg” for “Nike-Air-Max-Torch-4-Running-Shoes-Size-10.jpg.”)
  • Upload instructional videos (if they’re helpful to users), and build out an FAQ section, which should help customers feel wooed and welcome. Resolving issues about return policies or shipping timeliness via product-specific answers or an email exchange with customers will make your site feel like a safe payment gateway rather than one of the many spammy portals clogging up the internet.

Final point: Loading time. While it may seem like an afterthought, the time it takes for a page to load has the power to clinch or ruin a purchase. Google ranks pages that load quickly higher up in the SERPs, but even if it didn’t, watching an endless still-thinking-about-it circle reach 99% before buffering out is tantamount to a shoe salesman going to the back to find Reeboks in your size and never returning. Your audience will lose patience and hop over to your competitors’ sites. So remove plugins, oversized images, cumbersome hero headers, or any other functionality that’s keeping your pages from loading at the brisk pace of everyone’s impatience.

Simplify Your Sitemap

Let’s wander back into that metaphorical in-store experience. Now imagine that it feels like a maze. Everything’s dim, you can’t find the checkout counter, you go through the door and you’re in the alley, you venture up an M. C. Escher staircase and bump your head against the bottom of the landing it’s connected to. Once you escape this labyrinth, you’re probably never coming back. Websites work the same way: If the architecture is too confusing, users will click around for a second (well, more like fifteen seconds) before jumping out and never returning. Similarly, if search bots can’t crawl a site with ease, they’ll downgrade its SEO.

The lesson here is to make your sitemap navigable. Your homepage should link to product categories, which should link to subcategories, which should link to the products themselves. Feel free to cut out any of those intermediary steps, if you can, but try to follow that category-subcategory-product linearity—as opposed to building a sitemap that resembles a shredded bead curtain, with grandchild pages dangling in all directions. Users should be able to access all the pages in your site with a maximum of three clicks. Any page that you reach after four clicks is known as a “deep page,” which search engines consider to be poor UX.

Structure your information hierarchy upon an edifice of internal links, but also link out to well-known sites, which helps you warm up to the glow of “authority” that search engines have already bestowed upon those other sites. Finally, run a site audit to make sure that none of your links are broken, which is kinda like the digital equivalent of letting a beam slip in your building. (Not great for business.)

Publish Content Regularly

You do recall the “12–24 million eCommerce sites” that we mentioned earlier, don’t you? Ponder that for a minute: Depending on the sector you’re in, you may be up against 23,999,999 competitors. (With the added stress that 89% of consumers are more likely to buy from only one of those competitors, Amazon—in many ways, the progenitor of eCommerce—than anybody else.) So how do you stand out? You take the same approach we’re taking—you produce homegrown content.

That content might be blogs, videos, podcasts, Instagram posts, email newsletters, or all of the above. Just make sure that, if you start it, you keep it going. Google tends to keep an eye on you for the first six months. Once you prove that you’re publishing consistently, you may drift up the search results. But to sustain that momentum, create work for two audiences—the robots that rank you, and the people who read you. The paradox about how you can’t get published unless you’re published applies in the digital age, as well: Search engines won’t boost you high enough in the SERPs unless people like your content, but you’ll never know if people like your content unless it’s high enough up the SERPs for them to find it.

One way to escape that figure-eight is to create high-quality work where you answer your users’ questions, create buyer guides, explain the value of the products that you’re selling—and do it on a set schedule. If you attract followers who look forward to hearing your thoughts, you may notice that your site is getting buoyed past your countless competitors.

Make the Checkout Process Easy

Perhaps the smallest yet most vital step in optimizing your eCommerce site is to ensure that the transaction process feels simple and secure. So when you design the checkout page, strip away the excess. Create a module where consumers can enter in their email and password to sign into their account, or give them the option of continuing on as a guest. Display their virtual cart with a picture of the item that they’re buying, plus a total cost (broken into an order value and a shipping fee), and two buttons—one that lets them edit their order, and one that lets them pay. Any extra functionality beyond that is most likely superfluous.

A/B test the checkout phase yourself to make sure that you can glide through it seamlessly, and add internal links that route customers to that FAQ section that we mentioned, or an email where they can reach you if their order goes haywire. Making it easier to buy from you will encourage more people to buy from you, which will nudge up your conversion rate and tell search engines that your site is useful—and, therefore, should be more visible.

Consult an Agency

If you’re selling a couple of thumb pianos and bike desks that live in your garage, you may just need a Shopify Lite account and a few Facebook announcements to make an extra buck on the side. But if you’re an online vendor who’s invested in premier eCommerce options, consider hiring an SEO agency like Jacob Tyler. We’ve been following Google’s webmaster guidelines for over 21 years by now, so we can advise you on SEO strategies tailored to your brand and adapt those strategies to the fluctuations in search engine algorithms. But here’s our parting advice: People crave convenience, and if your site saves them a commute and a wait in line, you’re well on your way to creating an optimized eCommerce presence.

Clutch Recognizes Jacob Tyler Among San Diego’s Top Advertising Firms for 2021

Your success depends on how you communicate your brand to your audience. Jacob Tyler works with your brand to reveal the story of what you do and why you do it—and help bring it to life. We take a lot of pride in our work and are excited to announce that Jacob Tyler has been recognized as a leading advertising firm according to research by Clutch. Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews platform that helps brands across the globe connect with top marketing and advertising firms.

Every month, Clutch recognizes the highest-performing B2B companies by industry, service focus, and location. We work hard to deliver the best products and experience to our clients, and we’re proud that this hard work has been recognized by Clutch.

“We are thrilled to be a prominent leader on Clutch for the past 5 years,” said Les Kollegian, Jacob Tyler CEO. “Clutch has created a significant impact on our client base—which is now growing internationally—and our overall company growth.”

Jacob Tyler was also named one of the top B2B firms on Visual Objects in the web design space. Visual Objects is a portfolio website that showcases work from top creative firms around the world.

For over 21 years, we’ve thrived in an industry defined by constant change and fleeting success. We’ve worked with hundreds of different businesses across a variety of industries. We are a dedicated group of seasoned professionals and we’re great at what we do. The Jacob Tyler team would like to extend its gratitude to our amazing clients who continue to support us. We owe this awesome recognition to each and every one of you. And we love hearing your kind words!

“What really distinguished Jacob Tyler from the beginning was that they assigned a large group to me, even though I was a new client.” – Founder & President, Dermatologic Products Manufacturer

If your brand needs some recognition, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

How Social Media Impacts ROI:

Social media is the great leveler of our age, the apotheosis of the shift from the one-to-many to the many-to-many models of communication, the subway train that banker and bus-boy alike all ride. In certain ways, it’s also the most complex innovation in digital marketing, so it’s worth remembering that digital ad spend eclipsed traditional advertising budgets in 2019. By 2023, digital will comprise over two-thirds of total ad spend. Point being, social media seems here to stay, and companies should use it to maintain an ongoing conversation with the world—enhancing their brand awareness and extending their customers’ lifetime value.

Yet even though social media may be the preferred advertising art form of the future, it’s still often so unruly, so hard to track and control. Social content can send shock-waves through the internet, conjuring up a tsunami of likes and shares and reposts, but—was it worth the cost? Hard to say. Or, at least, hard to correlate those intangible results to sales figures on a 1:1 basis. So how do you quantify this most qualitative medium? You’re about to find out.

Calculate Your Investment

If you want to determine how your social media marketing impacts your return on investment, you need to keep a record of your investment. Tab up the cost of the platforms that you’re using. (Most are free, but you may be paying for a premium version of a management tool, etc.) Then take note of the money that you spent on paid digital ads and on labor. Correlating a content creator’s salary to the results that come back probably isn’t arithmetically sound, but it’s worth poring over hours billed per project or how much you’re shelling out to freelancers.

The meaning of the numbers that bubble up may depend on how your social media eventually performs. For the moment, though, tally it up and put it aside.

Match Metrics to Goals

As you track how much you’re spending, determine what you want to accomplish with that money. Do you want to improve your SEO, add new email signups, sell more puppy-training sessions through your ecommerce platform? Pinpoint your goals, then calibrate the results with metrics that are commensurate to the value of those goals. 

Let’s say that you want to improve your SEO. Measure whether your bounce rate goes up or down—but not whether your profits go up or down. Conversions and site traffic and lead generation all tie together, but they’re also distinct returns. So choose the yardstick that you want to plunge into the market, and benchmark your current stats so you can compare them with the outcomes. Knowing how you perform now will give you a sense of how realistic your goals are. Imagine that 100 people have signed up to your email list. Adding another 100 this month is—to put it mildly—ambitious. Adding another 10? Doable, and a good goal.

Bear in mind, though, that there is a bewildering array of objectives that you could achieve and KPIs that you could measure. So, we beg of you, don’t try to measure them all. Track a few metrics—and track the right metrics. A savvy social media marketing agency might tell you that views, likes, retweets, and followers are considered “vanity metrics.” Sure, it feels nice when someone gives your post a thumbs up, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a business result (like a sale or a new customer). Whereas other insights are more illuminating:

  • Bounce rates tell you if you’re maintaining your audience’s attention. 
  • Engagement rates tell you how many people are commenting on your posts. 
  • Converting click attributions tell you which ad a customer clicked on before making a purchase. (More on this stat later.)

Sharpen Your Tools

Since tracking and measuring are integral skills in social media marketing, it should come as no surprise that instruments galore exist to crunch the numbers on how social impacts ROI. Here are just a few of them:

  • Hootsuite built a calculator where you can plug in data like Facebook visits or landing page conversions and match them against your overall investment. 
  • If you want to get precise about those visits and conversions, let Google Analytics give you a panoramic view of all the numbers flowing through your funnels.
  • Building links with UTM parameters helps you understand which sites your visitors came from, which channels routed them in, which part of a promotion they clicked on, and so on. 

The takeaways that these tools provide, in sum, indicate which of your marketing efforts you should work on because they’re underperforming—as well as which ones are over performing, and need some extra rocket fuel poured on them.

Don’t Wait to Iterate

A good digital marketing agency is always measuring the results of a campaign, but they should also measure different versions of that campaign to gauge which one impacts ROI most effectively. So keep A/B testing. Target different audiences. Experiment with a range of tones. Tinker with the copy and the CTAs. Sub out a carousel for a pulldown ad. See what works, but also adopt the mindset that no one thing “works.” The market’s always in flux, so be ready to pivot on strategies as you monitor which aspects of a campaign your audience responds to the best.

Companies that don’t like how their audience is responding—or that panic because their audience isn’t responding at all—sometimes hose out more content as a quick-fix solution. Beware this tactic, because inundating the market can feel spammy. In a word: Slow it down. People prefer digital experiences that feel well-executed and personalized to them rather than torpedoed willy-nilly in their general direction.

Redefine the Return

You know how much money you’ve piped into your social media plan, and now the results are coming back. But what do the numbers mean? A reasonable business leader might assume that one dollar spent on social media should return at least one dollar in revenue. As we’ve indicated, though, your upfront return might not even be money at all.

Strictly speaking, companies don’t need social media. Factories and restaurants and brokerage offices would pump along just fine without a Facebook account. But having social media imparts legitimacy onto your brand. Think about it: If you’re applying to an engineering firm, but they don’t have a LinkedIn page, wouldn’t they seem behind the times to you? (Like, probably-not-much-career-growth-here behind the times?)

Without a social media presence, you also lose opportunities to stake out what distinguishes you from the competition. Look at this Ben & Jerry’s tweet about how Brown v. Board of Education led to the school-to-prison pipeline. The comments that their post garnered range from “This is why you’re my favorite brand of ice cream” to “Bro, you’re ice cream.” Yet Ben & Jerry’s is at least positioning itself front and center in the public forum. Is this positioning performative or genuine? Up for debate. But it seems that the value of engaging with multiple audiences about a complex topic on social media may be cultural cachet and brand visibility rather than a single line-item amount.

Give it Time

Print advertising was all about big, bold declarations—billboards or magazines plastered with headlines that wowed viewers. Digital advertising is less about seizing an audience’s attention and more about serving them bite-sized reminders across the channels they frequent. One of the difficulties with social media is that it’s snackable, and perfectly suited to serve up those reminders, but it moves so quickly that it can put campaigns into hyperdrive, truncating the lifespan of a marketing investment and making its results too intertwined to unthread.

Remember “last click attributions”? That metric can help you see how a post might lead to 100 people clicking into your site and spending $5,000 on your product. All that’s useful to know, but some marketers argue that the insights it provides are somewhat blindered—it doesn’t take into account the other touchpoints that had previously introduced the customer to a brand. After you Googled, “I want the best vacuum cleaner,” Dyson and Shark ads may have popped up on your social platforms. You did your research. You were leaning toward Dyson. Then you saw one last Dyson ad on Facebook and clicked the link and made the purchase.

That single Dyson ad may not have been the superstar in this scenario. Maybe it was just the last reminder in a series of waves and winks—many of which happen through multiple interactions with Dyson’s social media that are hard to alchemize into dollars. So even though social media is fast-paced, give it enough time to mature and glue together all the collateral that contribute to your brand awareness. The return you get on that may be immeasurable.

How to Dominate the Search Engines (SEO and Paid Media):

Fun fact: This month marks the 15th anniversary that the Oxford English Dictionary first listed “Google” as a verb. Google and other search engines have since become so important to the business world that digital marketers encounter this question from our clients all the time: “Can you get us to the top of the first search results page?”

That’s a steep request, but also a pertinent one: Search engines are the starting-point for 93% of web experiences, yet only about 25% of users venture onto the second results page. We all know that search engines are in the business of selling your data to corporations, but we allow them to commoditize us because they route us to the answers that we’re looking for. (If they didn’t, we’d jump over to their competitors.) So to dominate the search engines, keep in mind these marketing strategies that the engines reward—and the ones they penalize.

Master the Elements

If you want search engines to crawl your site, you need to become proficient in the basics of search engine optimization. Here are just a few tactics to consider:

Plan Out the User Journey

Before you delve into alt tags and meta descriptions and the rest of it, audit your digital identity to gauge how users are interacting with you. Is your bounce rate going up or down? Are you achieving the holy trinity of clicks, likes, and shares? What’s the final conversion that you’re driving your audience toward? Figuring out how your channels connect will help you plan SEO strategies that ladder up to a larger objective, rather than just improving your metrics for the sake of metrics.

Weave in keywords into your digital content, but limit yourself to about one keyword per 100–150 words—and write a few long-tail keywords that contain the entire phrase that someone might be searching for (4–6-word lines like “how to write a cover letter” along with smaller snippets like “resume” and “job application”). Remember, only weave in long-tail phrases if they feel natural. Search bots will lower your SEO score if your long-tail keywords sound like pianos dropped into the middle of sentences that were otherwise flowing along smoothly.

Incorporate Links

Search engines understand that the internet is a hyperlinked database of information and that we’re all clicking through 37 tabs at once to find the answer to our most pressing question right this second. So if you work in links that are specific, sincere, substantial, and succinct, and that connect to relevant content, search engines will consider your site to be “authoritative.” (If that term seems oddly inflated, that’s because it’s a euphemism for sites that aren’t spammy and that don’t annoy the search engines’ product—us.) Avoid linking to content that’s over a year old, and include internal links to improve the visibility of the lesser-known pages of your site.

Don’t Forget Mobile

In 2011, about 35% of Americans owned a cell phone. A decade later, that number has zoomed up to 97%. Worldwide, you’re looking at 5 billion cell phone users, and to top it off, about half of your audience is finding you through their phones. Point being, optimize for mobile. Search engines will filter you into oblivion if you don’t. Besides, a website today that’s riddled with wonky text and misspaced links when it loads on your phone just feels so … 2011.

Never Cry Wolf

Ever heard of “information scent”? That’s a UX concept that holds that internet users are clicking the links and CTAs that give off a palpable whiff of the intel that they’re looking for. But the opposite could occur, too—sites and content can emit a nasty information scent.

Let’s say you’re writing a blog about starting your own business. If your headline is “Learn How to Grow Your Bottom Line 1,000%,” people will click your link, but if you don’t supply a miracle-gro solution to boosting their revenue, you’re going to disappoint them. In the short term, you’ll drive traffic to your site. In the long term, users may call you out for the charlatan that you are, which could result in search engines downgrading you because of misleading content and sneaky redirects.

Act Local

Search engines are a quandary. On one hand, they make the global village even more united and universal. (Every day, people from Nebraska to Nairobi are all Googling, “How do I fix the printer?”) At the same time, they exert the equal and opposite force of localizing the world. People may or may not be thinking globally these days, but they do seem to be buying locally: Searches with the phrase “near me” in them have risen 150% in the last two years, and 28% of online local searches result in a purchase.

Whether you’re a Mom and Pop shop or an international conglomerate, you’re located near someone, so optimize your web presence for local SEO to make it easy for people to find you, digitally and physically. Update your Google local business listing with the pertinent details about your operation (hours, address, phone numbers), and post customer feedback—especially if it’s positive. Search engines will boost your site’s visibility if people rave about you, since you’ve demonstrated your value to their users.

Make Your Content King

To get noticed online, you need to produce something noticeable, like videos or a blog, and push it out on a regular basis, which demonstrates that what you’re saying is timely and current. If people like watching or reading your work enough to linger on your site, search engines will reward you for having a low bounce rate, since that metric tells them that your site is (you guessed it) valuable to their users.

We’ve talked about linking out from your site, but the real goal is to have authoritative sites link to you. Imagine writing a blog about how to harness fusion and National Geographic gives you a shout-out on social media. Search engines will propel your site up their rankings. But you don’t have to solve one of science’s biggest challenges to craft an organic media plan. If you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur, write an article about your market niche on Forbes that links to your site. Upload your videos to YouTube and your music to Spotify. Even guest blogging on less-established domains can drum up the SEO credit that search engines recognize and respect.

Pay to Play

Blogs, videos, backlink hierarchies, designing for mobile—these are all SEO strategies, sometimes termed “owned media” because they appear on channels that companies or users control. (Or that Big Tech lets you think you control.) The other approach you could take is paid media, where you outright pay search engines to rank you higher. One benefit of paid media is that it’s precise: Spend enough, and you can plop your content in front of your target audience, your competition’s target audience, people who are midway down your funnel, and so on.

The main caveat with paid media is that it can feel, well, like you paid for it. Is it really a surprise when Nike serves you an ad about how great Nike is? But when consumers praise Nike on Google Reviews—doesn’t that feel more credible, like humans are recommending a product to each other? Praise like that is called “earned media,” and brands sometimes pay to put that media in front of audiences that their paid media was intended for. Don’t be afraid to pay for ads, just be sure to interweave them with owned and earned media, and keep in mind the old adage about how money can’t buy you likes.

Be Useful to Users

The seven major search engines today are Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo!, Yandex, Ask.com, and DuckDuckGo. But let’s not kid ourselves—“Google” has entered the lexicon in a way that “Bing” has not for a reason: Google commands over 70% of the search engine market and 85% of mobile traffic. Google now handles (give or take) two trillion searches each year. Web optimization trends die every season because Google’s webmaster guidelines change all the time, so you’re better served studying their algorithm rather than trying to trick it. Better yet—study what your audience wants. Explain something that users might not know (how to tie a tie, how to interpret case law, how to dominate the search engines) and Google and its brethren are more likely to route them your way rather than to your clickbaity competitors.

Which eCommerce Platform is Right for You (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce)?

Everyone from freelancers to multibillion-dollar conglomerates are now launching their own ecommerce brands, in part because an online shop can expand your audience from the local foot traffic that a brick and mortar might attract to a worldwide network of retained customers. As a response to the pandemic, a lot of businesses that sold through traditional in-store methods opened ecommerce accounts in 2020 to ship their inventory while all of us were stuck at home. The effect on the market was evident: Analysts expect sales from borderless ecommerce to crest $4.89 trillion this year—a trend that shows no sign of slowing down.

Today you can choose from more than 370 ecommerce platforms out there. For this blog, though, we’re going to focus on three of the biggest names in ecommerce: Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. Each platform sometimes positions itself as an all-in-one solution that caters to unfunded entrepreneurs and mega-brands alike, but the truth is they perform better for different business echelons. So which one is right for you? Read on to weigh your options.

Shopify

Out of the three platforms, Shopify tries the hardest to be everything to everyone. Hence the five plans that it offers, which scale from simplest to most complex in this order: Shopify Lite, Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus. Here’s a breakdown of each tier:

  • Shopify Lite: $9/month. Best for a blogger or startup looking to sell products.
  • Basic Shopify: $29/month. For new businesses wading into the market.
  • Shopify: $79/month. For businesses with one retail store.
  • Advanced Shopify: $299/month. For businesses with 2+ retail stores.
  • Shopify Plus: $2,000/month. For big brands like Heinz who want unlimited online stores and a bevy of digital marketing options.

 

Pros

Users subscribing to any of the Shopify plans tend to find that they’re easy to set up—adding in your products, choosing a domain name, managing your operations from a central dashboard. Shopify is also SEO-friendly and compatible with mobile, and it comes with a 24/7 Help Center to assist you with tech questions. Another perk: You get your pick of 70+ customizable templates. Which is a generous amount, but as we’ll find out later on, you can’t customize Shopify to the same extent that you can tinker around with some of its competitors.

Cons

One of the downsides of Shopify is that it uses its own coding language, Liquid, which works in tandem with HTML and CSS. So if you’re not already comfortable with coding, you may want to hire a programmer to help you out. Oh, and depending on your plan, Shopify charges you roughly 2% per transaction, and they make you pay for add-ons and nonstandard features, as well.

Takeaway

Shopify is user-friendly, scalable, and requires relatively little technical knowledge. (Plus, it provides support if you do have questions.) If you’re a business netting under $50 million a year, this may be the right platform for you.

 

Magento

While Shopify offers its users five options, Magento gives you two: Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. Open Source is the platform’s small business offering, while Commerce is its premier version—the cloud-based option with a subscription fee.

Pros

Magento lets companies set up a unique and customizable storefront with a range of features and a library of over 5,000 extensions. SEO-friendly? Check. Compatible on mobile? Check. Dashboard that gives you a top-level view of live stats? Check again! Magento also makes it easy to glide through the checkout-payment steps.

Cons

But on the topic of payment: They work in fees aplenty for add-ons and web hosting (to name just a few). If you want to upgrade your plan, expect to shell out sums in the four figures. And fair warning to all non-programmers: Magento offers a user forum where developers around the world can compare notes, but no real support for the layman with rudimentary tech questions. Unless you have some background in web dev, the endless customization options of the templates may prove overwhelming.

Takeaway

Magento is a powerful platform best suited for global brands whose tech teams can tweak its features—themes, layouts, plugins, demos, virtual shopping carts—to their products and sales strategies, not the other way around. If you own data warehouses or ship out of 56 locations, this may be the right platform for you.

WooCommerce

About 30% of all online stores use WooCommerce, and for good reason: it’s flexible, SEO-friendly, and easy to integrate into your WordPress site—because WooCommerce only runs on WordPress. Keep that in mind: No WordPress, no WooCommerce. 

Pros

Anyone with a working knowledge of WordPress can navigate WooCommerce with comparative ease, picking up a web host, registering your domain name, installing and activating the plugin, and so on. The Storefront is pretty easy to figure out, too, and it comes with mobile functionality and a dashboard with an overview of sales and orders.

Cons

WooCommerce is self-hosted, so a lot of the maintenance and managing falls back on you. Plus, you gotta pay fees for hosting, themes, a domain, and security features, all of which add up (but, it could be argued, are worth the cost). Like Magento, WooCommerce doesn’t offer much email or phone support. If you have a question, you need to file a ticket, which WooCommerce says it’ll answer within 24 hours.

Takeaway

WooCommerce has fewer tools than Shopify and it’s less customizable than Magento. But it’s generally cheaper than those other platforms, and a good option if you just want to launch a site to get some revenue coming in before you scale up. If you’re a small or medium-sized business that’s not selling that many customized products, this may be the right platform for you.

 

Jacob Tyler’s Approach to Ecommerce in 2021

So which of these ecommerce platforms is right for you? The answer to that is just the first decision you’ll need to make if you want to open your online store. You’ll also need a digital marketing strategy to advertise your brand. That’s where Jacob Tyler comes in. We love working with ecommerce clients—expanding their cyber presence and getting eye-opening results. Give us a call today so we can help you hang out an e-shingle and hit launch.

Why a Good Logo is So Important

First off, let’s define terms: Your logo is not your brand. As we’ve written before, your brand is the reflection of your products and services, your workplace culture and the totality of your values. Your logo, meanwhile, is the imprimatur of your brand. Think of it as your professional coat of arms—the seal that guarantees the quality that you provide to your customers, the emblem perched at the apex of your brand architecture. Need a few more reasons why a logo is so important? Let’s get granular with it.

A Logo Gets You Noticed

Never forget how busy your consumers are. We’re all sending emails on our tablets, jumping on work calls on our laptops, hopping around between twenty apps on our phones. All that shuttling between tabs and devices tends to obliterate our attention spans into fruitflyish units of a few seconds that your digital marketing has to capture an audience’s interest.

Enter your logo, which amounts to a 1,000-words snapshot of your brand. If an ad pops up on your consumers’ screens and they get the vibe that even the logo isn’t for them—it’s too posh, not posh enough, perfectly posh but more (or less) than they wanted to spend—they’re going to keep on clicking on. Rest assured, this is judge-a-book-by-its-cover territory, and the cover of your book needs to scream, “Buy me. Because this experience, my target audience, is tailored to you.”

A Logo Imparts Legitimacy

Since your logo is the summation of your visual identity, a sloppy logo is akin to a restaurant buffet swarming with flies—that first-impressions moment when a customer thinks, ‘Definitely not spending my money here.’ And even a good product without a logo might seem scammy. Microsoft is an established brand, but if someone tries to sell you a Microsoft laptop that doesn’t have the Microsoft logo on it, would you trust it?

If your answer to that is ‘definitely not,’ then you’ve pinpointed the importance of a logo, which rubber-stamps legitimacy onto a brand—and onto all the collateral that your brand produces. Dedicate some time to perfecting your logo design, because it’s gonna live front and center on your website, tucked in the corner of your business cards and peppered throughout your social media feeds. As the North Star of your brand’s aesthetic, your logo ensures the consistency that consumers need in order to be confident that the same company is talking to them across a medley of platforms and campaigns.

A Logo Communicates Your Brand Personality

A good logo should be eye-catching, but it also needs to hint at what your brand does or convey who you are. For that reason, banks or life insurance companies opt for typography that looks sturdy and reliable. Whereas a business that delivers beauty and wellness products might draw from a palette of yellows and greens and pinks—and throw in a few monstera leaves while they’re at it—to send out vibes of optimism, health, joy. 

Position your logo so that it acts as a harbinger of the experience that consumers are about to receive, be it financial advice or a box of hand lotions and jade rollers. At the same time, bear in mind that some of the most famous logos toe the line between functionality and artistry—getting across what a business does in more subtle messaging. In the Gillete logo, the “G” and the “i” look sliced open, as if by a razor. The yellow arrow in the Amazon logo connects the letters “a” and “z,” implying that Amazon sells and ships everything from A–Z. The ultramodern Apple symbol nods to the Biblical story of the fruits of knowledge (with the bite—or byte—in it representing the tasting of that knowledge).

Because a strong logo should err on the side of coherency and precision, making even one of its design features too abstract can befuddle people. Take the Apple logo again. The bite-of-knowledge motif is clever, but Steve Jobs & Co. were allegedly worried that, without that bite, customers would think the fruit was a cherry tomato. Point taken. If you’re on a mission to build the most urbane tech company in the world, the last thing you want is to overhear someone saying, “Does this thing look like a tomato to you?”

A Logo Welcomes You into the Club

One of the truisms you often hear in marketing is that your customers need to see themselves in your branding. Which means that your logo should tell your audience, on some level, “You’re in the club.” 

Imagine that you own a gym and your logo is a bodybuilder lifting a ponderous barbell above his head. That logo is going to do wonders to attract lunkish fitness fanatics rather than the just-making-a-change crowd, because an effective logo has its own personality and it talks to the personality of its clientele. The Mercedes-Benz logo is refined, silver, sleek. The Nike logo is on a swift upward-and-onward trajectory. The Coca-Cola logo is energetic and bouncy. The iconography of each of these brands tells you what the brands stand for, but it also fulfills a blank-canvas effect of absorbing meaning that customers pour back into them.

One of the most original recent examples of this in-the-club blank canvas may be Disney. The Disney logo is Walt Disney’s signature written against the backdrop of a fairytale castle, but it’s sometimes abbreviated to the silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head, which is three black circles resembling a Venn diagram that’s drifting apart. Think about that: Three black circles can stir up memories of watching movies and reading books about adventure and friendship. Those memories, in turn, are powerful enough to sway people to subscribe to Disney+, get married at the Happiest Place on Earth, and become annual passholders who fill closets upon closets with Disney merch—which are stamped all over with three black circles.

That’s the power of a logo.

A Logo Champions Your Individuality

Your logo design should be the crowning symbol of your values and beliefs, the shield or flag that your company rallies behind, the signpost that guides consumers along their journey into your fold. All true—but stay flexible enough to change it. Case in point: Check out Apple’s ye olde logo from 1976, a landscape portrait of Isaac Newton reading under an apple tree (with a William Wordsworth quote decorating the frame, to top it off). Pivoting to the minimalist apple with the bite taken out of it was the right move, because Apple is all about sophistication and simplicity. So be honest about who you are and what you want your logo to say about you. Otherwise, you may end up contriving an image rather than consolidating an identity.

Why Copywriting is Important… And Why You Probably Can’t Do It Yourself

Copywriting is a curious art. Virtually everyone in the ad-business world is literate, so it’s easy to assume that all of us can write with the best of ’em. Ask non-specialists to design a logo or code JavaScript and they may lack the basic skills to even start working. But, writing—we text and email all day, don’t we? Doesn’t that qualify anyone to write ads and websites?

Not really. Don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of great writers out there. Yet even great writers steeped in college lit courses or seasoned in composing long-form stories might never come across the principles of advertising writing that make for excellent print collateral or website design. So if you can afford it, shell out some money for professional copywriting. Here’s why it’s important.

Copywriting Sells

Imagine talking to a car salesman who makes you feel like you’re trapped and withholds information from you. You’re probably not going to buy a new Lexus from this person. Now imagine that the salesman is charming without being pushy and seems knowledgeable rather than hungry. That guy might get you to sign on the dotted line today. The same fundamentals of salesmanship apply to the copy on, say, your website, which amounts to a conversation with your audience that should be enjoyable for them.

The balancing act here is to connect with users as fellow humans while also observing the more technical to-dos of UX/UI copywriting—optimizing keywords, avoiding duplicate content, weaving in external links, and uploading metadata into the CMS. Fusing SEO (search engine optimization) strategies with a relatable voice will help your audience A) find you and B) like you, which tends to amplify your brand awareness and lead to higher conversions.

Copywriting Improves CRO

So far, we’ve talked about SEO, but a related term, CRO (conversion rate optimization), is equally important. SEO is the process of luring an audience to your site. CRO is the process of urging that audience to take a certain action on your site—be it buying your vampire lust novel or signing up for your seminar on how to enter the arbitrage business. 

Smart copy helps inch up your conversion rate percentage, since it fulfills a salesperson-tour guide capacity of establishing trust, clarifying the USPs that separate you from your competitors, using language that caters to distinct user groups, and so on. Your copy, in total, is your brand voice. If people love that brand voice, you’re on your way to retaining a base of customers who purchase from you again and again.

(Good) Copywriting Wards Off Calamity

A strong copywriter should serve as a QC gatekeeper, saving your brand from the marketing equivalent of that gauche-pickup-line moment that can bruise your rep. Companies don’t like to admit how many times their campaigns flop, but they do—all the time. Look at this ad that Mr. Clean ran in 2011. The design appears to depict a mother teaching her daughter (with joyous exuberance) how to do house chores, while the copy reads: “This Mother’s Day, get back to the job that really matters.”

As you can imagine, that ad faced swift backlash. We don’t know who wrote the copy, but our guess is that it was someone with a tin ear whose insensitivity may have cost the client a heap of money. Because competent Head of Copy directors know what effective campaigns look like, they also know what disasters look like. So they earn their paychecks in part by finding the best phrases that bubble up in the first-draft creative stages and cutting everything else. Ergo, they often talk to their teams like this: “Keep working on this tagline. Bury this concept and don’t ever show it to anyone. Wait, this idea might have legs …” 

Copywriting is Always Changing

In our humble opinion, writing a 10,000-word story is sometimes easier than fitting the perfect 10 words onto a billboard for a scrap metal yard client, finishing up a landing page for a patent search startup, and then knocking out a blog for a beards-and-brews shop—on any given Monday. With the long-form story, you can at least sink into the storyline and narrate from a single perspective. Whereas when you’re juggling copy assignments, you’ve got to master the chameleon-style art of shuttling between a range of brand voices and account strategies.

As a copywriter, you know that your billboard headlines can be longer and more ad-like, your landing page copy should fill in the knowledge gaps of the users who read it, and your blogs should be chunked into an information hierarchy. And you know how to write in all these formats in a tone that drives the appropriate result—whether it’s conveying information in an About Us page or sounding CTA-oriented in paid media. 

That even veteran copywriters can struggle with aligning voice, format, and client goals may be the most compelling reason to hire a veteran copywriter: They oversee the sometimes boggling responsibility of making sure that your links are accessible, that you’re leading with benefits-driven language, and that every last H3 subhead helps boost website optimization.

Copywriting Requires Research

The word “copy” is prefixed in front of “writer” for a reason: In practice, copywriting often amounts to winnowing vast reserves of information into a few sharp lines. You’re not exactly copy-pasting what the client has already written, but you are distilling existing content down to its essence. Which means that before they can even write a single line, copywriters spend a lot of their time researching everything from licensing deals to the patient access journey in healthcare to the great chestnut blight of the twentieth century.

So if you need copy written on a bevy of subjects, bear in mind that you really have two jobs in front of you: First, becoming a quasi-expert on a given niche. Second, condensing your newfound expertise into writing that grabs people’s attention and influences their buying habits. Because even if you’re an authority on a certain subject, you may not be an authority on how to convey that subject with a few core insights. Copywriters do all the research about your brand to pinpoint why it matters in a way that nudges your audience further down the marketing funnel.

You Just Can’t Hack It

You’ve probably heard the term “hack writer” before; it derives from “hackney,” or a horse that you could hire for cheap. If you underinvest in copywriters, you may end up with a stable of hacks, rushing out a high volume of words that produce a low caliber of brand. Remember, one daft headline on a site or one typo on a book jacket can torpedo an entire messaging strategy. When you hire a worthy copywriter, you’re not only getting a deep researcher—you’re also teaming up with an editor who reviews the orthography of each piece of content with such rigor that your business always sounds svelte and sophisticated. For that reason alone, leave the writing to the pros.

9 Ways to Boost Your SEO

When was the last time you ventured past the first page of a Google search? Unless WebMD has freaked you out — along with the rest of us — and you’re clicking deeper and deeper to make sure your papercut won’t give you typhus, you probably just pop a question in the search bar and hit the first link that appears. If that’s the case, then you’re among the 75% of users who never dig beyond the first page of a search. 

Which makes sense: People are lambasted with choices these days, and to avoid decision paralysis, our minds tend to scramble for a single answer. That’s why a menu with five dishes seems more svelte than a menu of five pages. If you’re a business, you want your site to be the first option on the menu. And the way to get there? Search engine optimization, or SEO. Here are nine SEO techniques that can help buoy your site to the top of the Google Machine.

Anticipate Why People Come to Your Site

Search engines are (to a large extent) in the business of finding answers for people. Type in “Best Wines to Buy,” and Google will list pages of wine shops and purchase options. Now type in “Awesome Vineyards 2021,” and you’ll get a spate of world’s-best-wineries sites and tour schedules. So ask yourself: What do you want people to do on your site? (Hire you? Apply for a job? Read your favorite recipe?) Tailor your content so that search engines identify which questions you’re answering and how their users will benefit from finding you.

Value Your UX

Enticing visitors to click through your site enhances your SEO, because Google recognizes that your pages are useful for its customers. So make your UX clear and navigable. Intersperse text with images and videos, chunk up your layouts with H1-H2-H3 header tags, and stay open to using white space (which calms the eye and makes content more readable). And never, under any circumstances, use popups. Just … no, people. No.

Prize Quality Over Quantity

To get noticed online, you’ll want to push out content optimized with keywords, but Google penalizes you for keyword stuffing, in part because the average Googler will stay on sites that feel timely and smart longer than they will on sites that read like a robot wrote them. Some studies also indicate that long-form articles (over 3,000 words) attract more traffic and shares than smaller articles (between 901–1,200 words). So feel free to blast on, but keep it fresh.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!

We all know writing with keywords optimizes your copy, but images can boost your SEO, as well. Images that are too large drag down a page’s loading time, so whenever possible, resize or compress them. Save photos as JPEGs and line art or text-heavy images as PNGs. And add in alt tags (or “alt attributes”) into the code on the back-end of those images, which helps browsers find your site and also satisfies a number of accessibility requirements. 

Be the Strongest Link

SEO agencies will advise you to link your content to external articles, but don’t discount the value of internal links, either. If you audit your site’s information hierarchy, you may find that some pages are viewed more often than others. Linking the oft-viewed pages to less-viewed pages will flow traffic to those neglected child-pages, helping Google discover and crawl them. That, in turn, improves the SEO of your site as a whole.

Play Tag

Write title tags and meta descriptions in the back-end of your site. Title tags are the headings of a page, and meta descriptions are text that appear in a search below those headings. Imagine that you’re writing for the “Venues” page of a state park. “Venues | State Park” is the title tag, while your meta description should be phrased like a CTA. (“Rent our venues at your state park …”) Together, title tags and meta descriptions are behind-the-scenes heroes vying for Google’s attention when someone types in, “Where can I rent venues at my state park?”

Go Niche

Around 4.5 billion people currently have access to the internet, so how do you carve out your own space online? You find a niche. You like gardening, but so do millions of other people, so you focus on how to grow orchids in a cold climate. You love sports, but so do the rest of us, so your site covers the latest in chess boxing or underwater hockey. You — well, you get the point. Hone in on the thing that enough people care about but not enough people talk about and build your content strategy around providing answers in that space.

Jump in the Conversation

Remember how we said search engines find answers for people? As any SEO agency will tell you, the people with the answers are often referred to as “authorities.” You can establish your authority through blogging or linking to other authorities, but you can also find a Q&A site like Quora and answer questions there. Airing your opinion too often might get weird, but giving a real explanation now and again and linking back to your site — when it’s warranted — tells search engines that you’re a reliable source within the cosmos of information floating online.

Nab an Interview

We get it — convincing someone to interview you is about as easy as landing an interview at your dream job. (In other words, not very.) So you may as well start your hustle now, because interviews operate like SEO word-of-mouth and augment your site’s visibility. Email bloggers to see if they want to chat. Talk to your buddy’s buddy who’s got a podcast. Getting on the talk-circuit in your field is bound to happen if you plug away at it long enough.

Google is Goliath. But that Goliath would collapse if it didn’t get us the answers we need — otherwise, we’d hop over to competitors like Yahoo! or Bing. You can increase your chances of ranking in all these search engines if you follow the tips above, but think through the reason people are coming to your site in the first place. We’ve been in the game for a minute now, and we’ve learned at least one thing along the way: The ultimate optimization is being useful to your audience. Do that, and you’re halfway to being discovered.

A Checklist to Build the Perfect Website

Take a good look at your car. ‘So what?’ you’re thinking. ‘It’s just a car.’ Well, according to some estimates, the average car is made up of 30,000 parts. You don’t think about all the gears and pipes and turbo air intakes hidden within each model, because engineers have put it together so seamlessly that it just looks like one unit to you — a singular “car.” The same goes for any decent website, which is composed of hundreds of decisions stitched into one integrated layout. The better it’s been built, the simpler it looks.

Don’t be fooled though—building the perfect website requires crossing off a lengthy checklist of to-do’s. Every web design agency has their own schedule of planning and executing a site build, but here’s one we suggest you follow.

Set a Budget

How much does a website cost? How long is a piece of string? A freelance designer can make a DIY brochure site to showcase their portfolio and get everything they need out of it. Whereas a business that wants to track a donation form, build a member login portal, catalog an interactive shopping matrix — yeah, you should probably opt for the DIFM (do-it-for-me) route and benefit from a web development company’s expertise. Added functionality always costs more, so determine which site features you need and how many you’re able to pay for.

Register a Domain Name

Whether you’re going with a free Wix template or shelling out $100,000+ for a site, no one will be able to appreciate it if you don’t claim a domain name, which is basically your address on the internet and costs around $10–20. Check out Domain.com or GoDaddy to see if the domain you want is available, but don’t be surprised if it’s not. (After all, the internet is a star cluster of two billion websites — 400 million of which are active, but who’s counting?) So if the domain you want is taken, ask the web design agency you hired which name they recommend. Tempting as it is to get creative or quirky here, you’ll want your URL to be as similar as possible to the name of your business so prospective customers can find you.

Value the UX

One reason to hire a web design agency is that they’re staffed with UX (or “user experience”) designers. These talented folks are digital artists who keep the experience of their audience top of mind as they create a website design, which should incorporate a color palette and a copy .doc into modules that solve a different problem on each page. The “Donate” page drives visitors to, well, donate. The “About Us” page tells the company story. The “Become a Member” page touts the perks of membership. If all that sounds intuitive, that’s because the UX designer has made the ride feel effortless, so your visitors further your business goals with each click they make on your site.

Make Your Content King

Web copy needs to get to the point. Sure, you want your writing to lure visitors in, but don’t wax poetic. Front-load your copy with the most relevant info about your business: email, address, a few lines about what you do. Use the same tack with social posts and paid advertising — content that people like to snack on and that directs traffic back to your site. With a blog or a newsletter, consistency is key. Publish on the reg to drum up an audience. Optimize it with keywords, and then link out to related blogs and articles. All those strategies impart upon your work enough authority to make it rank higher in Google searches. (Because, really, when was the last time you clicked past the first page of a Google search?)

Ship It!

At long last, the site is finished. Oh, happy day. You’ve bought your domain. You’ve designed your layouts. You’re excited about revving up your content initiative. You’ve been working on this thing for months and you’re ready for it to be over. We understand — but we insist you do some last-minute QC. Proof the copy, triple-check that the links work, write metadata into the CMS, and set up 301 redirects to steer visitors familiar with your old site toward your new site. 

One final thing: Plug in Google Analytics to track how many people are viewing your domain, where they’re coming from, and how long they’re staying. (These insights give you a bird’s-eye perspective of your web performance.) Take a breather. And then take the wheel: Hit launch, post about it on Facebook, and congratulate yourself on assembling a sleek and sexy site.