A New Website—or Maybe Just a Makeover

Are you tired of your dated website but not up to creating a new one? 

There may be a workaround

If your site was built in WordPress, in many cases we can apply a new design theme to achieve a complete transformation. I’m working on one of these projects now, and it’s a remarkably easy solution that dramatically extends a website’s shelf life. Rather than a new website, maybe just a makeover would be the right solution for you. 

My client is a small CPA firm with some specialties—that are not getting promoted

Their site is nearly eight years old. While the new theme is a significant improvement, there remains the matter of new content, images and improved navigation. In the last few years, new partners with unique specialties have joined the firm and it’s time to promote their expertise.

• Besides being a CPA, “John” has a real estate background, does appraisals and works with industry clients to put financial systems into place. Having been a real estate agent, he knows that financials can be somewhat chaotic for real estate industry professionals. 
• “Sarah” is doing some work as an outsourced CFO. She’s working with several of her clients to take a more strategic role. She works closely with the firms’ bookkeepers for day-to-day accounting, which frees her up to take on a more strategic role. Sarah is doing forecasting, putting financial systems in place, analyzing cash flow and taxes. It’s a win-win for clients and Sarah—tax season is relatively stress-free.
• One of the partners has a Ph.D. in taxation and years of experience. He also teaches a class at UCBerkeley. Time to promote this guy! 

Their old site was not showcasing their skills or expertise

My clients launched their site without a thought to SEO or attracting new clients. Like many of us, they were delighted to have it finished! But they know they’ve been missing opportunities. We: 

• Identified lively new images that are representative of their typical clients, and we updated the homepage slider, adding visual appeal and energy to their site.
• Rewrote their bios to showcase their wide range of experience. One partner works with international clients to keep them in compliance with US tax laws. 
• Developed case studies that showcase how they work with their clients. Working with a CPA can be intimidating. People want to know about timing, the process, what they need to bring to their first meeting. They want to know about confidentiality. 
• Updated the testimonial page so endorsements are fully fleshed out.
• Turned the business name into a logo and tagline with use of a more stylish font. It has more marketing presence now.
• Fleshed out the Yoast plugin on the backend to improve SEO.
• Added calls to action, making it easy for a user to contact them for more information.

A series of incremental changes contributed to an important website makeover

If your site is dated and not generating leads, rather than starting from scratch with a whole new site, think of a makeover. This might be a solution for you. 

Contact us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing experts. 

Introducing Gutenberg, WordPress’ Block-Based Editor

Let’s face it. Only the seriously nerdy look forward to product updates, and WordPress’ 5.0 (WP) upgrade represents a substantial change to the editor, code-named Gutenberg. According to the WP marketing people, Gutenberg’s “a bold leap forward.” That’s marketing speak for a learning curve of WordPress’ block-based editor.

What to expect from WordPress 5.0

The biggest change for most of us is the block-based editor. Blocks are content elements that you add to the edit screen to create content layouts. Each item you add to your post or page is a block. There are blocks for all common content elements and more can be added by WordPress plugins. There are blocks for paragraphs, images, videos, galleries, audio, lists, etc. 

Previously if you wanted to add a table in your content, you needed a separate table plugin. With Gutenberg, you can simply add a table block, select your columns and rows, and start adding content. 

• Each block comes with its own toolbar that appears on top of the block. Each block can also have its own block settings, which show up to the right of the edit screen. 
• You can move blocks up and downvia drag and drop. 
• One more thing that’s pretty cool: Blocks can be saved and reused individually—if you’re blogging and insert a call to action, for instance, you can save this and auto-insert it into your next blogpost.

You may already be using block-based editor technology 

HTML email applications are using blocks, making it easy for those with little-no experience to easily drag and drop elements into place to create newsletters. I just used MailerLite, a MailChimp product, and it’s based on drag-and-drop block components. 

WordPress owns the market on websites for small-medium-sized businesses as well as for individuals. Its power has always been ease of use and the gazillion plugins that dramatically expanded its functionality—a whopping 60,000 unique plugins in the WordPress plugin directory.

Gutenberg: A better visual representation of what your page will look like 

Squarespace and Wix have become very popular website platforms, and they’re eating into WordPress’ market share. WordPress believes that with Gutenberg: “The editing experience will give users a better visual representation of what their post or page will look like when they hit publish.” Clearly, by improving WordPress’ site-building functionality, the WP team is determined to hold onto their market share. 

If you prefer not to use the Gutenberg Editor, you can keep the classic editor by installing the official Classic Editor plugin. However, that’s not a great idea. There will be software upgrades, and you’ll be missing out on functionality and may run into compatibility problems. 

Gutenberg affects themes and plugins, too

Aside from the editing experience, look for the emergence of Gutenberg-friendly themes, which will be designed to take advantage the editor’s new features. A few themes have already been released, such as Atomic Blocks and the new default theme, Twenty Nineteen that are Gutenberg-first focus. 

Need some help with Gutenberg or thinking about a new WordPress site? 

Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing experts. 

Use the Power of Yoast to Optimize Web Content

WordPress’ Yoast is a plugin that can help you optimize your website content. Yoast creates fields on the back end of your website where you can identify keywords and write metadescriptions. Metadescriptions are the little narratives that show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) right below the link to your website. You can control these, so why wouldn’t you? Think of these as little customized promo spots. Make it easy for yourself and use the power of Yoast to optimize your web content.

Yoast will help you optimize your website content

After you’ve written your landing page content or blog, scroll down to the Yoast fields and identify your focus keyword and write a metadescription. Now scroll down and see how you did. Yoast rates your effort for its search engine optimization (SEO) value and readability. Green is good. Red sucks.

Now go back and make corrections. You’ll find that this gets easier. I generally write my content, then go back and retrofit it.

• Your focus keyword is critical.This word/phrase should be integrated throughout your page/blog. It should be in the page title, the first and subsequent paragraphs and in your subheads.
• No keyword stuffing allowed. Beginning with the Mobilegeddon algorithm change in 2015, you now have to have something to say. Google hates it when you fill a page with meaningless keywords.

Yoast doesn’t stop with keywords; it will also help you:

• Identify readability. For maximum understanding, we should be writing at a fifth-grade level. Yoast gives us a readability score, and most of us fail.
• Get in the habit of using short, crisp sentences. Break long sentences and paragraphs into short, crisp ones. Use short words and subheads. Make it easy for a reader to scan your subheads; together they should tell a story.
• Header evaluation. Yoast will let you know if your headline is wider than the viewable limit. If your title has a bunch of skinny letters, you can use more characters than if it has a lot of fatter, rounder characters.
• Metadescriptions. These should include your focus keyword and be within 156 characters.
• Internal links. Including an internal linking strategy on your website is a great way to encourage readers to stay on your site and drill down through your pages.
• Images. Every page should include an image. There are four fields that are associated with each image—title, caption, alt tag and description. Fill these in and use your focus keyword.

One more thing: Search engines love long posts

Keywords are about, well, words. You can’t rank if there’s no content. The longer your posts, the greater your chances of appearing in search engines—they have more clues to identify what your posts are about. An ideal blog post should have around 1,000 words to ensure  enough keywords for ranking.

Frankly, the prospect of coming up with a 1000-word blog on a regular basis is terrifying. But do think about 300-words as a minimum standard. If you’re writing something about which you’re knowledgeable and passionate, this shouldn’t be paralyzing.

Need some help getting started? Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing experts.