Dated Website? Consider a Facelift

As websites have moved toward responsive design, many of my clients are confronting the harsh realities of creating new websites. In many cases, these sites have content that is no longer representative of their businesses. Their images are irrelevant, often small thumbnails, the navigation clumsy. But starting from scratch and building a new website is always a major initiative; it can be expensive and time-consuming.

Happily, there may be a relatively simple solution

If your site was built in WordPress, in many cases we can simply apply a new design template to the existing site that can achieve a complete transformation. I just finished a project that included this kind of facelift, giving a website a new lease on life and dramatically extending its shelf life.

The client is a husband-and-wife team of smart, savvy business brokers with 50+ years of collective industry experience and a high customer-service ethic. They had a canned website—the vendor provides content and infrastructure, but gives them a lot of latitude for customization. The content feed is very good, but my clients have never taken advantage of it (the last post was in 2013) or done much customization.

Their old site was becoming a liability

My clients are not marketing people, and they launched their site without really giving much thought to SEO, their marketing presence or how the site would look to a prospective client. They were relieved to get the site launched and be able to put their business broker hats back on. 

But now they recognized that their site was becoming a liability; they were missing opportunities to generate new leads, and they asked me to help them update it. This was a simple project, and happily, some easy changes have made a dramatic difference. It showcases my clients as industry experts, has good navigation and increased SEO value.

We made changes that help showcase their industry expertise

• Identified lively new images that are representative of their potential clients and updated the homepage slider, adding visual appeal and energy to their site.
• Rewrote their bios to showcase their wide range of experience, using their keywords throughout.
• Developed case studies that showcase my clients’ high level of customer service and expertise negotiating leases, dealing with government agencies, performing market analyses and business valuations.
• Updated testimonial page so endorsements are fully fleshed out and attractively displayed on the page.
• Turned name of company into a logo/tagline with use of a more stylish font, creating a more distinctive marketing presence.
• Fleshed out Yoast plugin on backend to increase SEO value.
• Added calls to action on all of their personal pages, making it easy for a user to contact them for more information.

None of these efforts by itself was complex, difficult or time-consuming, but collectively, they helped update a website that was uncompetitive. If your sit is not generating leads, rather than a whole new site, this kind of makeover might be a solution for you. 

Contact us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re SEO and content marketing experts.

Goodbye Keywords; Hello Pillar Pages

Search has changed, which means it’s time to rethink the way we create content.

Google has gotten a lot smarter about making associations

Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving to provide the best possible answers to searchers’ queries. If you search for “running shoes,” Google will now also serve up results for related words, such as “sneakers.” Google is now interpreting conversational queries as entire thoughts rather than individual keywords. An estimated 64% of searches are four words or more.

Organize websites according to main topics

As a result of Google’s evolution and our subsequent behavior, websites need to be organized according to main topics. In the current model, we create individual blog posts that rank according to specific keywords. The result is disorganized, difficult for users to find the exact information they need. It also results in our own URLs competing against one another in search-engine rankings because we produce multiple blog posts on similar topics.

A better solution: Creating pillar pages with links to more specific topic clusters

The first step in creating a pillar page is to stop thinking about your site in terms of just keywords. Start thinking about the topics you want to rank for first. Choose a topic that’s broad enough that it can generate more related blog posts that will serve as cluster content, but not so broad that you can’t cover the entire topic on a single pillar page.

• Let’s say you write a pillar page about content marketing. It’s a very broad topic, so your cluster topics might be about blogging or social media.
• Fundamental to the pillar-page concept is a comprehensive linking strategy among the pillar page and its cluster topics.
• A pillar page should answer questions about a particular topic but leave room for more detail in subsequent, related cluster topics.

Pillar pages and SEO: More inbound links = higher placement in search

Pillar pages help position your content so users can easily browse your website and consume your blog posts, videos and infographics. There’s a lot of clutter online, and it can confuse Google’s algorithms. Google loves a clean website experience with a thoughtful linking strategy that tells it exactly what each piece of content is about. Inbound marketing and sales expert HubSpot experienced an increase in their rankings when they used more internal links.

Use personas to help identify the interests and challenges of your audience

If you haven’t created personas, this is a great time to do it. Your personas will help identify the top interests and challenges of your audience, providing topics for pillar-page content.

I’m doing some reorganization of my own website to more closely follow the pillar-page concept, and I’m finding it helpful to create an organizational chart that maps out broad topics that are my pillar pages and the cluster topics that support them.

Your pillar page will gain Google authority through the quality inbound links from your subtopic content.

Need help rethinking your website content? Give me a call—let’s strategize about how we can make your content work for you.

Emoji Take On Business Communications

I’ve begun noticing that even the holdouts have started including emoji in personal texts and emails. And why not? They’re fun, they’re whimsical, they brighten up our messaging. Emoji can help convey emotion and personality; they help tell a story and build relationships. Think of emoji as virtual body language that helps us understand intent.

Emoji have transcended personal communications; they’ve entered the business arena

Business push notifications—newsletters, email blasts–that include emoji in their subject lines are opened a whopping 254% more often than those without the digital smiley faces and icons, according to a Leanplum study provided to Mobile Marketer. The response to notifications that include emoji is three times higher than it was last year. I’m not the only one who is ramping up to emoji!

• Email messages with emoji in the subject lines are opened 66% more often than those without. The average number of emoji used per message has doubled in the past year.
• While emoji were once derided as unprofessional for business communications, brands are steadily incorporating them into marketing messages to attract consumers’ attention and convey more meaning and emotion than what words alone can provide.
• Leanplum’s study of open rates for push notifications and emails demonstrates that emoji help capture mobile users’ attention amid the flurry of text-based communications. A women’s clothing retailer saw an 81% lift in open rates and a 363% surge in revenue from outgoing messages that contained the icons.
• Emoji have shown massive influence on internet communication. Last year, according to Facebook, more than 60 million emoji were sent every day on its core social network, while five billion were sent via its Messenger chat platform. As people and brands grow more comfortable using emojis in everyday communications, these numbers will increase.
• July 17 is World Emoji Day. The organizers present awards such as Best New Emoji, Most Anticipated Emoji, Excellence in Emoji Use and which emoji best represents 2018 as Emoji of the Year.
• The first emoji was created in 1999 in Japan. Since then, the collection has grown to more than 3,000 unique icons.
• Yes, there is an emoji newsletter to which you can subscribe. Look for an estimated 157 new emojiscoming to major platforms throughout 2018.

Here’s something I’m betting you didn’t know

In an effort to be politically correct, you can change the skin color of emojis. Really.

• Tap the “People” emoji section by tapping the smiley face option at the bottom of the emoji
• Hold down the emoji face you want to change and slide your finger to select the skin tone you want.
• The selected emoji will stay that skin tone until you change

A few words of caution about emoji usage

Emojis are appropriate for some business emails in the same way that jokes are okay in some job interviews. Know your audience. Avoid emojis if it’s a new acquaintance or if you’re uncertain how someone will respond. Keep in mind that not everyone loves a smiley face.

Need help with your business communications? Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing specialists.