Month: July 2018

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How to Retarget Website Viewers with Facebook Ads

retargetting customers

Facebook advertising is one of the most affordable ways to reach customers online. It is also the platform that allows a business to laser target its audience by thousands of interests and behaviors. However, no behavior is more important to target then someone who has already visited your website and did not purchase an item. That is where retargeting strategy comes into play.

This is the strategy when someone has visited your website or Facebook page and you want to target the same person later with a Facebook advertisement. To facilitate this, you will need to create a Facebook advertising account. Once you have one, you will need to set up an audience to serve you ads. When you select create your audience, you will want to select the goal of website traffic. There are several options to chose from. We suggest you select people who visit specific web pages that you have set up a Facebook Pixel on a site page over the last 90 days, and now save your audience.

Once you have your audience saved, you need to design a graphic for your Facebook ad. There are specific requirements you will need to follow for this, such as creating a graphic with an Image size of 1,200 x 628 pixels. You also need to ensure that no more then 20% of the image is text, or your ad will not be allowed. Once you have designed your ad, you can go into your account manager, upload the image, select your audience and then simply set a budget. We suggest a very small budget to get started, say $10 a day or less for a period of a week to test out and see if you are getting good results before you spend a lot of money with no return on investment.

As a preface to this, it is important that you understand how to set up Facebook pixels and that you have added a pixel for a month or two on the page before you want to start a retargeting ad campaign.

If you would like to learn more about Facebook advertising or feel you need professional help to optimize your ads and reach the right people, don’t hesitate to contact a social media marketing agency like VRG Web Design.

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Facebook Reviews are the new backlinks

5 star online user reviews

Third party reviews are now being viewed by search engines such as Google and Bing as the most important feature to ranking and have taken over that top spot from back links. This makes online feedback and evaluations such as Facebook reviews  as critical to your local SEO strategy as getting other websites to link to you with great anchor text. More specifically, according to MOZ’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, online reviews are thought to make up 10% of how Google and other search engines decide to rank search results. Local business reviews are more important than ever.  93% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses in 2017, with 12% looking for a local business online every day according to brightlocal.com consumer review survey. Think about it, if you want to know where to go to eat for dinner in a new town, what would you do?  You would probably ask people on the street or friends who have been there what they like. Well, social media makes that even easier with third party validation. Which is why 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

In the past, a link from a third-party site was considered a vote of importance and based on the anchor text, relevant for your site. However, with so much gamesmanship going on and the ability to buy your way into local directories, or even pay a website owner for a link on their resources page, search engines now look at inbound links as not as trustworthy as they once were. In fact, the trust factor for reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook coming form consumers is the most important thing you can have, if you want to show up in the Google Local Pack (top 3 on the map).

When you search for a specific business on Google, there is now a box on the right side of the results page that gives you information about the company including pictures, times the business is open and most important, highlights of consumer reviews posted by verified customers, which shows you how many Facebook and google reviews have been posted.

So what is the takeaway from this blog post? Make sure that every time you perform a service or sell a product for someone, ask them to review your company on one of the big 3, Facebook, Google, and Yelp. A great way to do this, if you sell online is to even set up an email automation campaign upon completion of the sale to request that review.

If you need help with this or just want to get more information about how social media can impact your SEO efforts give us a call or shoot us an email today, or better yet, post your comment on the VRG Facebook page.

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What Makes Web Design Compliant with the ADA?

ADA Compliance for websites

There is a Federal law in the United States called The Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires businesses and other organizations to provide handicap accessibility. That way the disabled public also has access to the same services as other people. Most people think that the ADA only pertains to physical locations. In reality, it also includes websites and electronic media.

According to the law, web design must be as accessible as terminals, elevators, ATMs, and other user interfaces. The site must be accessible on all devices that include the desktop, smartphones, and tablets. The website that fails to comply with ADA creates a bad user experience for people with disabilities. Through ADA compliance, the website becomes accessible to everyone.

When creating the web design graphics, it is important to note that not everyone utilizes Google Chrome and other standard browsers. There are users that don’t update their browsers. There are also people who use different devices to access websites, such as audio scanners and text readers. These devices require special code to translate information on the page.

Typeface

The typeface is the main element of any website. It targets a specific audience and conveys a certain personality. When developing the graphics for a website, you should choose a font that’s practical and not stylistic.

To make it ADA compliant, choose a typeface that is easy to read. The font size must also be large enough to make the text readable on both small screened and large screened devices. The designer can choose to provide options to adjust the font setting that includes the decreasing or increasing the font size and changing the background.

Images

Most websites today rely on images to engage visitors. However, if the some of the target audience is composed of visually impaired individuals, having many images will not be good for their user experience.

To improve the handicap accessibility of the website, it should not rely on images to convey its message. Instead, the website should use images to complement the text and not be the main source of information. Images used on the website must have a descriptive context.

HTML Markup

The website must use the right markup for headings, page titles, and other elements to ensure screen readers give out the right information. This is also required to ensure the screen reader understands the structure of the page.

The programmer, SEO professional, and copywriter are responsible for structuring the content of the page. They must use titles and headings to organize the copy and make them easy to read by screen readers and humans.

Screen readers can’t read images, and that’s why images should have the correct ALT tags. ALT tags must be descriptive and give information that the image wants to convey. Search engines also use ALT tags to index images, which makes it more SEO-friendly.

These are just some of the things to consider when creating a web design that complies with ADA. It is important to find a designer or developer who has experience with handicap accessibility of websites.

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Checklist for a Local SEO Audit

checklist for SEO Audit

Most businesses thrive on traffic both online and in person from Google, Bing, Yelp and Facebook searches. In fact, with voice search becoming so important many businesses will only get visits if they appear in the top 3 local searches on Google, when someone searches for “keyword near me”. There are plenty of SEO company’s out there who for a fee will help you achieve better results. However, before you even get to that point, there is a lot you can do yourself to determine what problems may have and how to fix these on your own for better ranking in the search engine results page (SERP). Below is a checklist to help you audit your own website for SEO challenges.

  • Does your website have any broken link;
  • Does your website have Title Tags on every page
  • Is your name, address and phone number listed on all major directories and is it listed properly
  • Does your website load faster then other sites?
  • Does your site have any coding issues that Google may not like;
  • Has your content been duplicated anywhere else on the web;
    • http://copyscape.com/ – If your content is used on multiple sites, then search engines try to determine who was the original author and give priority to that site.
  • How many inbound links does your domain have?
    • https://ahrefs.com/ is a website that allows you to see who is linking not only to you, but also to your competition. This is very important because links from other websites to yours is one of the biggest factors search engines use to decide how relevant you are for your key words.
  • What are other people saying about your company with social media reviews.
    • https://www.google.com/alerts – On of the most significant types of links is reviews on Google maps, Yelp, Facebook and others such sites. Google provides a free tool to track whenever your name is indexed on a new page or post.

[schema type=”book” axbaxa_name=”SEO Audit” axbaxa_author=”Michael Goldstein” axbaxa_published_date=”2017-09-15″ axbaxa_ebook=”yes” axbaxa_description=”A checklist of tasks and free online tools to perform an audit on your website’s search engine ranking potential” ]

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How To Increase Page Load Speed In Word Press Sites

website on cafine

One of the key factors that Google has acknowledged as part of their calculation to rank websites in their search results page is how fast a site loads. Additionally, from a user standpoint, which Google bases many of its algorithms upon, the faster a web page loads the more likely a user is to interact with the site. As you can imagine, if a site takes 5 seconds to load every page, a user is not likely going to continue to wait for new content and will simply seek the information or application somewhere else. In fact, there is a direct correlation to slow loading pages and the increased percent of visitors to a page that exit the website. As evidence of this fact, a study by Akami found that around three-quarters of web users would not return to a website if, in their experience, it took longer than four seconds to load.

If you would like to get an idea of how slow or fast your website loads both for mobile and desktop use versus that of your competitors, check out Google’s page speed test. Google will even give you a few suggestions of things you can do to improve your web page loading speed.

In addition to the technical suggestions Google provides, there are some obvious techniques that have been discussed ad nosism on all the major SEO forums, such as reducing the size of your images and video or use a hosting company with more robust bandwidth. However, I want to discuss an often overlooked but so simple tactic for WordPress, edit your plugin strategy.

WordPress is a great platform for functionality because of the use of so many free plugins that allow users to add rich features to their site such as maps, contact forms, e-commerce solutions and so many others. However, often a website owner will download many of these plugins, activate them and never use them. In other situations, the plugins will be activated but the functionality provided will not really benefit the user and as such, every time their web page loads, the server needs to process a whole bunch of useless code that slows down a site.

There is a simple solution to this, which is to conduct an audit of your website plugins and determine first, if there are plugins that you are not even using. If this is the case, you can deactivate them and or delete them from your server. You also can search the WordPress plugin directory to find plugins that may provide the same functionality to are much more efficient, for example a caching plugin such as swiftlite works very well. Finally, you want to analyze whether the plugin is really helping you, or if it is simply slowing down your page.

One way to determine how much time it takes to load a page per plugin is to simply deactivate each plugin individually, then run the Google Seed test and see if there is an increase in speed. If you have a plugin that provides functionality that you really need, you can always download 2 or 3 others that do the same thing and test your page loading speed with each and then test the functionality as well to see what makes the best user experience.

If you would like more information about how to better optimize your website don’t be shy and give us a call today.

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Is your company listed correctly online?

retargetting customers

Many small business owners think that just because they have a website or Facebook page that their business is listed properly online. However, what many people don’t realize is that their business is not listed on many of the local directories that Google and Bing use to influence how high up someone is ranked, or even worse, that if a business has moved in the past, their correct address, phone number or even website is not listed.  Ensuring your name, address and phone are consistent on all major directories is one of the first things you should do when setting up a digital marketing plan.  Below is a free tool to use that will tell you how and if your your business is listed on the most important social media sites and search engines:

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Does adding keywords to your URL help improve search ranking?

Google results

There are many things you can do to help your website rank higher on Google when people search for certain terms. However, there are many myths that simply do not help, or even worse can result in your website being penalized. There are other techniques that will do nothing for you and just waste your time.  So the key is to determine what things you can do. VRG Web Design recently wrote a blog post on the first SEO activities you should do, which includes deciding on your key words.  There recently was a great article on Search Engine Watch discussing whether you should include key words in your URL is a ranking factor that will increase your likelihood of coming up higher on the results page, such as adding keywords.

There are two ways to look at this topic. The first is whether to include keywords in your actual domain name. The second is whether to include key words in your URL structure. It is our opinion that including terms in your domain name does not help for highly competitive terms, and only serves to make your domain name longer and looks spammy. However, if you can do so, and it makes your name easy to read or remember, then there is a benefit. For example, if your keyword is “Nepali coffee”, and you are lucky enough to own the domain name nepalicoffee.com, then you will have a benefit because it is easy for users to remember the name and when it comes up in search engines, it is easily identifiable. However, to simply add the text to a site such as johnsnepalicoffeeshop.com is a bit much. You also have to remember that it will make your email address very long every time you give it out.

On the other hand, if you are creating sub-pages, and one page is all about nepali coffee, then to set up your URL structure to read johnscoffee.com/nepali-coffee/ will work very well. In this example, Johnscoffee.com is the domain name and it can now have a page for each type of coffee it sells and try to rank of each of them. Moreover, it is easy for users and search engines to understand the content of the page and there are no surprises, so that users click off of the page quickly.

For more information or to discuss your search engine marketing strategy, you should contact a local search vendor near you. We would be happy at VRG Web Design to discuss this with you too.