For a limited time, free to current clients who pay for regular Web Care, I am offering to print a data driven report of your website upon request. This will include Security Checks, SEO / Analytics, and Broken Links, as analyzed by the software that has been handling your web updates.

By appointment, over a cup of coffee, we will sit and go over your website together, maybe something we haven’t done in awhile. Let me help you make a plan for updating your site’s outdated theme or layout, and improve content and user experience. We can discuss what is still working and what is broken or if your website is becoming “stale”.

Your company has grown and your website needs to mirror that. Let’s meet to discuss goals for 2020 and beyond! Email me to request your report and set up a meeting by phone or in person. I look forward to it!

I explain that  publishing blog posts, paying attention to website content key words and reorganizing their website for good user flow is a much better way to get new customers. It takes a bit of work, but it pays off.

I came across this article today and I find it very helpful in explaining this topic more thoroughly. So, if you are looking into ad words, read this first.

The article is by Holly Fong —— NEWFANGLED.COM

“It pains us to see money lost to misguided online marketing efforts. Unfortunately, this is fairly common for marketers that invest in online advertising without taking the necessary precautions. Almost all platforms with paid promotion options default to spending your budget as fast as possible. If you start a campaign without taking the proper initial steps, you can blow your budget in less than a week and have nothing to show for it.

For the highest return on investment from your online ads, there are important steps we recommend you take before opening your wallet. We’ve developed a four-step process, outlined below to help you reduce waste and get the most from your advertising spend.

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Do not waste money just to get more visitors to your website. You can spend thousands of dollars on pay per click (PPC) campaigns and drastically increase the traffic to your site, but that won’t necessarily impact your bottom-line. It is not just about getting more visitors to your site, it’s about getting the right visitors to find your website. Understanding who you want to target and what their needs are is the first step in establishing an online advertising plan.

The more targeted your audience is, and the more specific their needs are, the more money you can potentially save. Don’t waste your time bidding on keywords with high traffic terms, go after lower-traffic long tail keywords that are more specific to your target persona. Avoid reducing your potential ROI by marketing to an unrealistically broad audience. LinkedIn and Facebook allow you to reach your target audience with dynamically generated, personalized display ads. Your marketing initiatives and calendar should all be centered around your potential customers.

2. Get Informed on the Platforms

There are a lot of places where you can buy ads, there are various types of ads you can buy, and the landscape continues to get more crowded and competitive. Each of these various advertising platforms and ad types have strengths and weaknesses.

LinkedIn is a great platform for promoting gated content such as eBooks to drive and convert visitors on your site. You can use LinkedIn’s advertising tools to get your white paper in front of your ideal customers. LinkedIn allows you to target your audience by company size, job function, title, and location. You can buy both ads and sponsored updates to drive readers to your white paper.

Facebook is a terrific tool for retargeting contacts from your email list and promoting sign-ups for a webinar or event.

Wishpond has also outlined How Facebook Ads increased first-time webinar registration by 450%.

Google AdWords can be used to help you reach prospects based on keywords they’re researching online. Google AdWords is the world’s largest and most popular pay-per-click advertising platform, giving you access to potentially the largest audience. This can either lead to the highest or lowest return on investment depending on whether the ad has been set up for optimal efficiency. Google remarketing search ads narrow your audience to help bring visitors back to your site while increasing brand awareness and trust.

Depending on the asset you are marketing and the stage of the prospect you’re marketing to, a different mix of platforms will most effectively help you achieve your goal. However, the platforms should be viewed in a complementary, rather than adversarial, way to promote your content and services. For example, Google AdWords, LinkedIn and Facebook can be utilized within one campaign or to promote an individual landing page. The ad copy and budget will vary among platforms but the each platform provides another avenue of connecting with prospects.

3. Optimize Your Landing Page

The page you direct paid traffic to should be optimized for visitors coming from your online ads. Sending visitors to your home page or services page can be a confusing user experience if there isn’t a strong correlation between the page and the ad they clicked. You will typically see less time spent on the page and a much lower conversion rate when you pay for visits to these types of pages.

Additionally, landing pages should have one call to action, such as registering for a webinar. Your home and services pages typically contain various calls-to-action which distract the visitor and often can cost you a conversion. After a visitor has filled out the form, it is acceptable and encouraged to display the main navigation and allow the visitor to browse your site.

To take it a step further, we advocate for A/B testing the landing page. A/B testing is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one converts visitors at a higher rate. Subtle changes to the page layout can make a huge difference in the conversion rate. It is important that you only test one variable at a time. For example, you could test the call-to-action placement or the page copy, but do not test both at the same time. By testing one variable, you’ll be able to determine what change led to a better conversion rate. A/B testing is an ongoing process. We encourage you to regularly test all the pages that you’re spending money advertising for the highest ROI.

4. Understand How to Track and Review Results

Possibly the largest benefit of online advertising is the ability to track everything. Honestly, if you are unable to measure how your ads are performing, then you probably shouldn’t invest in paid advertising at all. Once you’ve determined you’re going to invest in online advertising, you should get to know Google Analytics Custom Campaigns, learn how to create customized URLs, and make sure you have goals set up for all the conversion points (forms/CTAs) on your site.

Marketers often wonder if their paid ads are performing as they should be. It’s common for marketers to make the mistake of reviewing their results on a daily or even hourly basis. This is a bad idea and can lead to making premature changes. It is better to let your ads run, accumulate data, and make decisions based on the trends you see over time. We recommend using spreadsheets to track the performance of your online ads. It’s important to remember that form submissions and conversion rate are the metrics to focus on. Impressions and clicks are just a waste of money unless they help convert a lead, which can potentially lead to revenue.

Online advertising is not a quick-fix solution. To see an impact, you have to stick with it longer than a few weeks or months. Time and proper analysis are required to drive targeted traffic to your site and convert leads. Observing the struggles our client’s face in effectively running online advertising campaigns has led us to create the Newfangled Online Advertising Program. This is a 12-month program where a Newfangled strategist will work closely with your team to define your advertising goals, then suggest and implement a digital advertising mix on your behalf, and review the results with you on a regular basis. It’s the best way to make sure you’re not wasting your online ad dollars.

If you’re interested in learning more about this program, click on the button below, or contact us, and we can discuss putting together a program to fit your needs and budget.”

(P.S. I am not promoting you hire Newfangled, unless you have a good budget to do so — Deb Perugi)

You can take advantage of writing it on a Sunday and scheduling it for Monday morning if that is when you want your post to hit the internet. Just Save Draft on the right side of your editor and then Edit the Publish Immediately button right below. In fact I’m doing that now. The Publish button then turns into a blue Schedule button. Put in your date and time, save and you are all set.

Check your Google Analytics* a few days later to see how well the post did. You can learn from your own analytics if you review them regularly. Try a Monday at 7 am, then perhaps, at 11 am, etc.

A reminder to all. Use the Categories at the right column to add the article to your database. You may choose more than one category. Add a new category if you need to. Also helpful to SEO is the Tags area just below the Categories.

• To access your Google Analytics reports, go to the url for Google Analytics. (It has its own web site.) Log in with your Gmail address and password.

If your bounce rate is more than 40%, your web site is not doing a good enough job capturing their interest. Ideally you want a bounce rate of 10% or less. So how do you get the conversion you want?

Here are some tips:

1. Use Call to Action buttons: These buttons should be colorful, attractive and at the top half of your pages. You can add them to any and every page if you like. Pop ups work too.

2. Offer a freebie: Do you have a White Paper, Power Point Presentation, Video, Information Graphic or booklet you can offer? Joke of the Day? People willingly fill out forms to get their free info.

3. Make the forms short: We hate to fill out long forms. If all you want is their email, then just ask for that.

4. Use Landing Pages for ad campaigns: Landing pages reside on your web site but look different. They are more a flyer with a form than a web page. There are no menus or side bars. You can advertise your product or service discount and direct people to that page. Such as “http://yoursite.com/offer”.

5. Make your website easy to use: This is more about good design. The information on your website should be easy to access and logically laid out. Also called Information Architecture or IA.

6. Make it Mobile Friendly: We’ve all heard about Google’s new algorithm by now. As of April 21, any site that is not Mobile Friendly, moves down the search list. 20% of first time visitors to your site are using their smart phone. Time to look for some Responsive themes and upgrade your site!

You may be wondering how does one check on their conversion rate? If you have a google email account, you can go to the Google Analytics website and use that user name and password to sign in. Then, type in your web site’s address. It may take a week or two for any activity to propagate there, so be patient. Check back to their website again to read your stats. And let’s hope it’s good news!

See the article from Inman Daily by Erica Trafavoti that explains it here:

“The focus of this update is to provide a better search experience for mobile users. To accomplish this, Google will be “expanding [its] use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.” So what does that mean in plain English? If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, your search engine rankings and ultimately your Web traffic could take a hit.

This algorithm change has likely been in the works for a long time, as Google has made several announcements related to mobile devices in the past year, such as mobile usability tools, a mobile-friendly label in search results and even a mobile-friendliness test to give your site a pass/fail grade.

If you’ve been hanging on to your old-school website design for the past decade, Google has officially given you a reason to upgrade in the next two weeks. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, don’t panic, and definitely don’t pay someone from a spammy-looking “Your website is in danger” email to fix your site.

Here are some steps to take to ensure you’re prepared for this algorithm change:

1. Run your website through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. 

If you get a green “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly,” then you’re all clear. Skip to step 6. If you get a red “Not mobile-friendly,” then we have some work to do. If you manage your own website and were surprised to find out it wasn’t mobile-friendly, read on to the next step to see how to look for specific issues to fix. If you’re not the webmaster for your page or use a website provider, skip to step 3.

2. Check your mobile usability stats using Google webmasters tools.

If you thought your site was mobile-friendly, and it wasn’t, you can use these tools to identify any problems. This dashboard is designed to show you specific issues that are hurting your mobile-friendliness. If you haven’t set up your site with Google’s tools, here’s how. Below is an example of what a site with a few issues will look like in your dashboard:

You can click these usability errors and go directly to the page with the issue, and see what needs to be done to fix the page, whether it’s as simple as a change in font size or as complex as viewport issues that are preventing the page from adapting to smaller screens. Run through these errors and correct the necessary issues. Skip to step 5.

3. Check with your webmaster or website provider to see the status of your site. 

If your site is managed by another person or company and you’re getting a red notification from Google, it’s time to give them a call and see what you can do to get your site upgraded to a mobile-responsive theme. If your provider isn’t able to build mobile-responsive websites, move on to step 4. If you’re able to get upgraded, do it. In this case, change is good. After your site has been updated, skip to step 5.

4. Find a new website provider. 

Breaking up can be hard to do. If you have a long-standing relationship with your website provider, it can be difficult to leave and find a new one, but your business deserves better. When searching for a new provider, here are some things to look for:

• Live sample sites demonstrating previous work. It’s a good idea to plug these sites into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test as well, to check and make sure their designs are as functional as they are visually appealing. No examples to check out? Steer clear. A quality website designer or provider should be proud of their work.
• Responsive design, not separate sites for mobile devices. Google has stated in the past that it prefers responsive design over other solutions.
• Experience transitioning desktop websites to mobile-responsive design. Transitioning to an entirely new website design is a lot more complicated than simply changing layouts and images. Redesigning a website can hurt existing search engine rankings if not done carefully. Any links with long-standing high rankings can disappear if a URL structure is incorrectly changed. Inbound links, an important ranking factor, can also be impacted in a redesign. Previous experience transitioning sites is important to retain any existing search authority.

Once you’ve found a new website provider or designer who can build your perfect mobile-responsive site, move on to the next step.

5. Test, test, then test again.

Once you’ve gone through a site redesign, or any time you make tweaks to your site, it’s important to run through every page of your site and make sure links are working and pages are loading properly. Run through it on a smartphone or tablet if you can, too. 

Since you’re a real estate professional and not a website designer, it can be tempting to trust that your site is always up and running smoothly, and go days, weeks or even months without actually checking on your site. However, your website is your online representation to potential clients, and it’s important to know it’s up and running and collecting leads. If you check Facebook every day to see what’s going on with your high school sweetheart, why wouldn’t you want to see what’s going on with your business? When you’ve checked through your website and everything is good to go, you can move on to the final and most exciting step.

6. Celebrate

Your site is now mobile-friendly and you can avoid all punishment from Google on April 21. Now, you can focus on adding relevant, local content to your website to climb the search engine rankings even further.

What do you think about Google’s algorithm update coming this month? Is your website prepared? Please continue the conversation in the comments section below.

Erica Tafavoti is an inbound marketing expert at PipelineROI, real estate’s first complete inbound marketing platform. You can follow her on Twitter at@PipelineROI and on pipelineroi.com/blog.”

Avinash Kaushik from Google

A few months back I talked about how to know when to update your website. The general rule is to update after three years. A lot can change in that time, and you may not be aware of what you can do to keep up. Two important ways are: 1. Running a Responsive theme and 2. Using Google Analytics.

Is your site responsive?
Does it have a simpler more vertical design for the phone and tablet? Nearly 60% of your viewers will see your site for the first time on their phone. If it is not legible, then you can bet they will immediately go elsewhere for the service or product they need. (See Bounce rate below)

Did you know that many WordPress themes, but not all, are built with responsive styling? Basically, this means that the design adapts to different browser sizes — so that instead of needing a separate mobile site or mobile plugin, the content will be resized and rearranged to fit smaller screens.

My favorite responsive theme is Divi by Elegant Themes. Not only is it responsive, but it comes packed with a module based design layout. You can drag and drop elements or blocks of information around your pages.

For instance: You find out that the Call to Action block is recommended to be at the top of the page. Or, you want to call attention to a sale or special event. You can go right into that block and change the color, text or photo without any other change and then move it into a different position. Likewise, any slide in the slider module can be moved to a different order, or you can remove one slide or add a new one.

Bounce rate may be more critical than seo
Many of my clients are concerned about search engine optimization. They want it, and they assume new customers will be calling immediately. But, what if the customer is browsing when they find your website? They won’t necessarily respond to your Call to Action or Contact Us page. Many visitors will stay less than 1 minute and not go beyond the home page or page of entry.

But what bounce rate is good? According to Rocket Fuel Team at gorocketfuel.com: “As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.” To find out more about bounce rate, how its determined and how to improve it, go to this Google page.

Check out the video above from Google’s You Tube page: “If you could only choose one metric to look at, Bounce Rate might be your best choice. Learn why in this entertaining and informative segment from Avinash Kaushik.”

You can set up and see your bounce rate with Google Analytics. If you don’t already have Analytics up on your web site, do ask your webmaster to help.