Category: Search Optimization (SEO)

For new or established businesses, online marketing is a huge opportunity for brand and financial growth. Learning how to improve your online presence will take your business to new heights, but it can seem daunting without the right guidance.

What Is an Online Presence?

An online presence is the representation of a business or individual entity on the internet. There is a spectrum of online presence, ranging anywhere from non-existent to strong. The stronger your business’s online presence, the more visibility and engagement you command across digital channels such as websites, social media, and email.

This six-step guide to setting up an online marketing presence will walk you through the most important aspects of growing your business online. After establishing an online presence, you can identify and focus on the channels that are most effective for your individual business.

6 Steps for Creating an Online Presence

You don’t always need an online presence consultant to get started with internet marketing. You can use this six-part plan to build a foundation, then bring a digital marketing agency in once you’re ready for the next stage of growth.

1. Set Your Online Marketing Goals

As an entrepreneur or marketing coordinator, you need to know what you’re aiming for. You probably hear buzz from your network about different methods for creating a web presence on a weekly basis. Chasing down every one of these leads will leave you exhausted, disorganized, and possibly even broke.

Entrepreneurs frequently self-identify as “doers,” which can leave you particularly susceptible to this approach. Before jumping in head first, learn how to set marketing goals that will help your business succeed in a sustainable way.

Your goal-setting process should include:

• Aligning your mission statement with your potential goals
• Setting Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely targets
• Building a strategy that ties in objectives that will help you reach your targets
• Measuring your results and correcting course when necessary

An example goal might be: Leverage online marketing to grow profits by 25% over the next two years. You will then need to create short term objectives that help define the immediate activities required to reach your goals.

2. Create an SEO Strategy

With an estimated 3.5 billion Google searches per day, optimizing for search is a cornerstone of building an online presence. Not to mention, 35% of searches for products start on Google. The fact is, search engine optimization (SEO) should be baked into every digital marketing strategy you build at your business.

Identify the intersection of:

• keywords that are valuable to your business
• keywords that most accurately embody what your business offers

Don’t focus all your efforts on ranking for keywords that your customers or clients don’t recognize you for (unless you’re introducing a new product or service).

You can use tools like the Google Ads Keyword Planner or SEMrush to do keyword research. These tools can help you find popular search phrases and identify how competitive you must be to rank well for them.

Creating a solid SEO strategy will be paramount for your web design (in step 3) and content marketing strategy (in step 6). Reach out to MARION today if you need help from a reputable SEO company in Houston.

3. Build Your Business Website

The next step in creating an effective web presence is building your business website. But first, why create a website when you can make a Facebook page in 1/20^th of the time for free?

The simple answer is that you own your website. If Facebook decides to make a change or Instagram throttles the reach of your posts, your digital presence could be smothered. However, you can always maintain control over your business website. The best approach is to keep your core web presence on your website and use other digital channels like social media and content syndication to drive traffic back to your site.

The next important question – what makes a good business website? The two main components are:

1. SEO-friendly web design
2. Good user-experience (UX)

Turn your website into a conversion machine and improve your revenue stream today! Download our free eBook with 24 website must-haves!

SEO Web Design

Most people naturally understand the need for a visually appealing website that makes it easy for users to navigate and find what they want. What some business owners don’t naturally intuit is the need for your website to cater to searchers and search engines. Your digital real estate cannot sit idly by – it must attract users.

You could feasibly generate all your web traffic through traditional advertising, digital advertising, referral sources and word of mouth, but why not tap into the 3.5 billion daily Google searches mentioned in step two? This SEO checklist for new websites will get you started.

For more advanced techniques, get help from an Austin SEO company like MARION today.

Good UX

What about the visual appeal and user experience of your business website? Keep in mind that there are differences in UX and web design – what looks best is not always the most effective.

You’ll have to choose between creating a website using website templates vs. custom web design. Website templates are more cost-effective but will limit the creativity of your site. However, with the right amount of competitor and user research, you can still maintain an effective web presence with a DIY site.

Custom design is usually the higher quality option, but it comes with a much higher price tag. Because of the significant investment, learn how to choose a web design company before signing any contracts.

Once you find the right firm to build your site, learn how to write a graphic design brief that communicates your brand message to your designer. Learning how to brief your designer ahead of time can reduce the length and cost of your project.

For more help from an experienced Austin web design company, schedule an appointment with a MARION strategist today!

4. Leverage Social Media Marketing

Did you know that 68% of adults in the US claim to use Facebook? For a platform that is said to have more than 2 billion active users, this is a huge opportunity for your business. It’s not just Facebook ads that you need to consider – platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter all have significant users bases that can be tapped into.

Setting up a company profile on each platform that you intend to pursue is highly recommended. A social media profile can provide your users with details about your product/service offerings, hours of operation, and contact information. This initial setup of social media accounts is critical for reaching your web presence goals.

An organic social media strategy is a free way to start engaging with your audience. Start by learning how to create a content calendar for each platform, and how to curate content for social media. Once you know when and how to share content effectively, you can develop your strategy based on each platform’s results.

It’s important to note that organic reach on some of the major platforms (like Facebook) has declined over the recent years. Learn how to advertise on social media for the best return on your marketing investment. A paid social media campaign can still be a cost-effective way to reach your audience and drive real results.

Reach out to MARION for help from an experienced social media agency in Houston. We can help you leverage social to build an online presence for business success.

5. Run Effective Email Campaigns

Surely email is too old and boring to be an effective marketing channel for your business these days, right? Even today, email continues to be a SIGNIFICANT method for maintaining or creating an online presence for your business. Email marketing is said to generate $38 for every $1 spent, which makes it one of the highest performing marketing channels available.

If you struggle to believe the statistics, it’s likely because your perception of “email marketing” and an effective email marketing strategy are very different. Email is more than just sending a blanket message to your entire contact database every time you release a new product or service.

Workflows, segmentation, and (a healthy amount of) personalization are the keys to an effective email marketing campaign. For example, imagine that you manage a lawn care business in the greater Houston area and you’re trying to use email marketing in Houston to grow your client base.

One approach is to use lead generation resources to grow a qualified list of potential customers. For example, put together a free fertilization schedule available for download on your website. In order to have the schedule emailed to their inbox, a web visitor must fill out a form with their email address and basic contact information.

After signing up for and receiving your free offer, you set up a workflow in your email marketing software that emails your new contact about a related free offer 7 days later. If they sign up for both free offers, you may send them a code for 20% off their first month when they sign a 6-month contract with your lawn care business.

By offering several free resources and maintaining different email workflows, you can build a database of engagement target customers that need help with their lawn care.

Learning how to build an online presence through email marketing isn’t easy. If you need email marketing in Austin or Houston, contact the marketing strategists at MARION today.

6. Build and Execute an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a key component of an effective SEO strategy. In fact, content marketing should play a major role in all B2C and B2B marketing strategies to help build your online presence.

The effectiveness and necessity of content marketing is due to the evolution of marketing over the past few decades. Marketing has shifted from a business-driven activity to a consumer-driven activity.

There are very few channels where a captive audience will subject themselves to an irrelevant product or service offering. Content marketing gives businesses a way to establish their relevance and solve consumer problems.

One of the most prominent uses of content marketing is business blogging. Maintaining a blog for your business is a great way to answer user questions that are relevant to your industry and highlight how your product or service is the best solution for that question.

Helpful and relevant blog posts can be used as a driving force in your social media marketing strategy, email marketing strategy, and SEO strategy. Not only are you able to share your insightful content via social media and email, but your blogs help to attract backlinks and organic traffic. You can even extend your content marketing to third-party sites by implementing a guest blogging strategy with related organizations.

Attracting interested users to your site is great, but understand that there is a difference in demand generation and lead generation. In order to generate new business leads you must use effective calls to action to capture contact info for your potential customers. By using the right internal links and calls to action, you can turn your blogs into a revenue-generating machine.

Trust MARION for Setting Up Your Online Marketing Presence

Best practices and free advice online will help develop your understanding of online marketing. With these new insights, we hope you’ve got a better idea of how to choose a marketing agency that will help you meet your goals.

For the best results, contact MARION today. One of our marketing strategists will identify opportunities for improving your business web presence and growing your brand!

Everyone hates a website that loads slowly. Consumers today have grown accustomed to near-instant results and a smooth online experience. Even the slightest hiccup on your website can cause visitors to abandon your site.

In today’s highly competitive market, having a fast website has become a requirement. Otherwise, your customers will turn to the competition for the online experience you fail to offer.

Why Does Website Load Time Matter?

A slow-loading website will kill your conversions. Consider some of the prevalent user experience and SEO statistics. On average, 47% of consumers have an expectation of two second load times or less. Even more shocking is the fact that 40% of consumers will abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

More than half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. And according to recent mobile optimization statistics, most mobile sites take 15 seconds to load on average. With most visitors abandoning sites after 3 seconds it has become more vital than ever to improve web page load time for mobile devices.

Is your website holding back your business growth? Download this free 8 point website checklist today, and start improving your results!

How Is Page Load Time Measured?

Measuring page load times will give you an idea of how fast (or slow) your website is rendering for visitors. Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse Audits measure a variety of relevant metrics to determine the average web page load time of your website.

After running a few tests, you may find that your site sits below the average page load times. Unless you’re a web developer, you may not know how to improve the load time of a website.

Making the proper corrections will set you apart from your competition.

How to Improve Page Load Speed Across Your Site

Average page load time is determined by a variety of factors. Understanding ways to reduce page load time will help you to greatly increase site speed and ultimately improve the performance of your website.

Here are a few tips to help you figure out how to speed up website load time.

1. Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests

When a web page first loads, numerous elements must download such as scripts, images, and stylesheets. It turns out that 80% of the load time for a web page is spent downloading the various elements of the page.

Each part of a webpage has an HTTP request made on its behalf; the more components on a page the longer it takes to fully load. To improve page load speed, determine how many HTTPS requests your website is making (this can be done by accessing Google Chrome’s developer tools).

Next, focus on the JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files found on the page. These files can significantly increase the number of HTTP requests made whenever a person visits your website.

Reduce the number of HTTPS requests your site is making by minifying and combining files. This process will accomplish two goals:

• Reducing the size of each file on your site
• Reducing the total number of files on your site

Minifying the files on your website will eliminate a lot of unnecessary code, formatting, and whitespace. The result will be a leaner, faster website.

What about sites that use PHP to deliver HTML, CSS and JS files? If you’re using a WordPress website, you don’t necessarily need to know how to improve website performance in PHP. Instead, consider installing the Autoptimize plugin. This will make the process of minifying your files simplistic and quick.

2. Use Asynchronous Loading for JavaScript Files

There are two ways scripts such as JavaScript and CSS load on your website – synchronously or asynchronously. Scripts that load synchronously render one at a time as they appear on your screen. Scripts that load asynchronously will load simultaneously.

Web pages typically load from top to bottom. When a synchronous JavaScript or CSS file is encountered during the rending process, the entire page will pause until that particular file is fully loaded.

If that file were asynchronous, the various elements of the page would continue loading even as that particular file continues to render. The answer is obvious – use asynchronous loading for non-critical JS or CSS files to speed up page load time.

3. Compress Images

Another great trick to speed up website load time is to compress images. The images uploaded to your site can be bulky and cause a significant strain on page load time.

WordPress plugins such as WP Smush are highly reviewed and provide the perfect solution to your image compression woes. With just a few clicks and a bit of patience, you’ll be able to compress the images on your site and experience a significant speed boost in the process.

Alternatively, you can losslessly compress images using free web platforms. TinyPNG is a popular tool for both PNG and JPEG compression. In 2016, Google publicly released their own image compression program called Guetzli. Unfortunately, there are very few free online tools using this program, but more tech savvy marketers can use the open source program on a local machine.

Don’t want to manage the technical details yourself? Let an experienced Houston SEO agency handle it for you!

4. Leverage Browsing Caching

Whenever you visit a website, the elements on the page you’re viewing will download to a temporary storage folder in your browser known as a cache. This allows for faster load times because the page won’t have to bother with another HTTP request for certain CSS and JS files the next time you visit the site.

You can experience website speed improvement by enabling caching on your site. Though this method doesn’t speed up your website for first-time visitors (you’ll have to rely upon other methods for that), you’ll significantly improve load times for returning visitors.

5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

You can leverage outside servers to improve page load times for your visitors. Hosting your site on a single server means that a request is sent to that specific server each time a user visits your site.

In instances of high traffic, all of your users will experience a significant slowdown due to the sheer number of requests being made at a single time. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help to alleviate the strain on your website.

A CDN allows you to cache your site on a network of servers that are based around the globe. When a user visits your site, all requests will be routed to the closest server. CDN’s help to eliminate latency issues that users tend to experience when they’re physically far away from the hosting server.

Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDN’s on the web, but there are several providers to choose from.

Boost Your Bottom Line with Website Load Time Optimization

Knowing how to optimize website speed is a skillset every digital marketer should have in their back pocket. This list is by no means all-inclusive, but you’ll undoubtedly boost the speed of your site by employing the above tactics.

Looking to optimize your website the right way the first time around? MARION is a digital marketing agency dedicated to helping small businesses thrive online. We offer Austin and Houston website design services that follow site speed best practices for the best performance.

We’ll build your website right the first time, so you can focus on growing your business. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help grow your business.

Whether you’re an agency, in-house, or DIY marketer for your own company, you know how critical your website is to the success of your business. Unfortunately, some businesses invest tens of hours and thousands of dollars into their websites without considering how they will attract visitors and generate business leads.

You do a quick online search – “Why is no one visiting my website?” All results point to one diagnosis: you need to do search engine optimization (SEO).

If you have any experience with web design, you’ve surely gotten an earful from an SEO professional at one point or another about how you’re doing it all wrong. While that’s not entirely true, let’s figure out why search engine optimization specialists are so passionate about pointing fingers at web designers and developers.

What Is SEO Website Design?

SEO web design is the practice of mapping out a plan to generate organic traffic, then designing a website according to that plan. This approach is counter to the traditional website design process where a site is built to look attractive with no strategy for generating traffic or customers.

The underlying goal of both marketers and website designers is the same – build a great website. However, there is misalignment between a marketer’s and web designer’s concept of an effective business website. Web development and SEO teams must agree on what makes a good business website before they can succeed.

The goal of a business is to have a website that serves existing customers, attracts/converts potential customers, and results in a significant return on investment.

Don’t leave money on the table by using a sub-par website. Download this free eBook today to discover the 24 website must-haves that could improve your revenue today!

When web design and SEO teams work together, the result is an attractive and SEO-friendly website that exceeds business expectations and revenue goals.

How to Build an SEO-Friendly Website

SEO-friendly website design requires that you front-load the process with strategy and planning, then execute after the bulk of the work is laid out. In the end, SEO web development ends up being about 60% planning and 40% execution.

The following considerations will help build a solid understanding of SEO for web developers. You can use these SEO website design tips to refine your current process and deliver a higher quality product.

Create a Keyword Map

Based on the industry and products/services that your business (or client’s business) offers, you will already have a good idea of which pages your website needs to include. Where business owners and web designers usually go wrong is not delineating each product/service into a definite keyword group. What does that mean?

Imagine that you are creating a website for a plastic surgery practice that specializes in facelifts and butt lifts. You may decide that you want a homepage and a surgeries page on your site. Unfortunately, your surgeries page probably won’t rank well for either of your procedures because it doesn’t cater to a single group of keywords.

A searcher looking for facelifts probably doesn’t want to see a page about butt lifts AND facelifts. They want to see a page about facelifts only. Your facelifts page won’t appear in search results because the main topic isn’t clear.

For the best search engine optimization, you need to design a homepage, a facelift page, and a butt lift page.  Your homepage can be about plastic surgery operations in general, but your sub-pages should focus on their respective operations.

Use a tool like SEMrush to identify which keywords you need to use. This is a paid tool that will cost about $100/month, but it helps you identify which keywords people are searching for online.

Once you research a list of relevant keywords for your website, break them up into separate groups and optimize each page for those search terms.

Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is an incredibly important decision that usually isn’t given enough weight. If you have a well-thought-out brand development strategy, it’s natural to include your brand name in your domain name. While this is a perfectly good business move, a good strategy for web SEO and design is to include a keyword in your domain name.

Despite Google’s 2012 filter to prevent spammy, low-quality sites from ranking with exact match domain (EMD) names, there are still benefits to including a keyword in your domain as long as your website is high-quality.

Having one of your main target keywords in your domain name will help tie your business entity to a specific topic. For example, a local business website might include its city name in its domain name to help bolster its digital authority for that location.

A plastic surgeon in Houston might use their business brand as their domain name. After optimizing their website for several years, they could rank for highly competitive keywords. Had that same plastic surgeon established a domain name with their brand name plus “Houston,” they would have been able to rank for the same competitive keywords much sooner.

Keep in mind that your domain name must align with your business vision. If you have any hopes of growing your business into a statewide, nationwide, or global organization, you should avoid including a local identifier in your domain.

Alternatively, you could use a topical keyword in your domain name that doesn’t restrict your locality. Using your brand name plus a relevant keyword is a good approach that will accelerate your SEO results. This too can be limiting if your business model changes, and you need to evolve beyond the keyword in your domain name.

For example, if Nike had chosen the domain name nikeshoes.com while creating its digital presence, they would have limited their capacity to rank for other apparel like sweatpants and hoodies. Always balance your brand and SEO strategy while choosing a domain name.

Web Hosting

Web hosting is a critical piece of SEO-friendly website development for several reasons. Your web hosting will have implications for cost, page load speed, quality assurance, and security.

A cheaper web hosting provider may seem like a great short-term financial move, but they may cause your web pages to load more slowly than a more expensive host. This can have negative SEO effects, increase your bounce rate, and decrease your customer conversions. You can read more about speed factors in our article about new website SEO.

A more expensive web host may also have better security measures in place, making it harder for hackers to harm your site. If something does happen to your website, a good hosting provider will usually have backups that you can restore. Find a balance between cost and features when it comes to selecting a host.

CMS/Site Platform

A lot of your web design SEO will depend on the platform you choose for your site. More advanced developers may decide to build an entirely custom website. However, most businesses use some sort of content management system (CMS) or website builder for their site, making it easier to manage on an ongoing basis.

One of the most popular platforms for websites is WordPress (WP). This CMS works well for both website design and SEO goals, and gives business stakeholders the option to manage their own site after it’s built.

There are other platforms like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, or Shopify. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, but we highly recommend using WordPress because of its versatility and broad user base. Because so many people use WP, there is plenty of documentation available on the web in case you run into an issue.

WordPress comes with a lot of SEO features built-in. For example, these features let you edit your meta title, page title, URL and meta description very easily. These features are frequently overlooked by web designers because they have little to do with the aesthetic of the page.

Page Load Speed

A website with cutting edge features and high-resolution graphics is the calling card of a web designer. Unfortunately, large resources and process-heavy websites tend to load slowly. On top of that, the popularity of accessing the web on mobile devices over slower internet connections is rising. If your website is too intricate to load quickly over a mobile connection, you will lose visitors and rankings.

In July 2018, Google rolled out its Speed Update that negatively affects the rankings of websites that load extraordinarily slow. The increasing importance of website load time encourages a balancing act between web design and search engine optimization.

An SEO-friendly design should include:

• Properly sized images – don’t upload large images and let your CMS scale them down to size.
• Compressed images – compress image files so that they load more quickly.
• Minified and Combined CSS and JavaScript files – fewer server requests can help speed up page load times.
• No Redirects – make sure there aren’t unnecessary redirects within your site when a page URL changes.
• No hot-linked images – include code that restricts other sites from embedding one of your native images on their pages. This will use your server to load images for their audience.

SEO specialists frequently take issue with designers who disregard the load speed of a website. Perhaps the biggest website development SEO takeaway in this article is to consider the consequences of all design elements on a site.

Designers and developers can use Google PageSpeed Insights and the Lighthouse tool within Chrome Dev Tools to identify and resolve loading issues. To easily find internal redirects or images with large file sizes, use Screaming Frog to do a crawl of your site.

User Experience (UX)

User experience is website aspect that designers generally handle better than SEO experts. It’s hard to disagree with the fact that a beautiful, awe-inspiring site is great for users.

When it comes to UX, website design & SEO are usually at odds over user intent. A beautiful homepage will impress a user, but what purpose is the homepage serving? If your homepage doesn’t account for the needs of a visitor and help them take an informed next step, you have a problem.

For example, a law firm website that features a high-resolution picture of the legal team and an About Us button front and center might seem appropriate at first glance. However, users might be more interested in recent cases that you’ve won, the areas of law that the firm specializes in, and the pricing of the firm’s services.

A great way to uncover potential UX issues on a website is to install Google Analytics and periodically analyze visitor behavior. The behavior flow report is an easy way to see where users enter and exit your site. If the bounce rate on any given page seems high, try A/B testing different site components.

Potential features you can test include:

• Site navigation
• Call to action button styles
• Call to action button text
• Call to action placements
• Prevalent page content
• Placement of trust indicators like case studies, testimonials, and accreditations

Be sure to keep page load speed in mind as well. A slow site is not only bad for SEO performance but bad for users as well.

Indexation & Crawlability

For search engines to easily access your web pages, you need to have a few technical SEO pieces in place. These pieces include:

• good sitewide navigation
• a sitemap
• non-restrictive robots.txt and meta robots
• good information architecture
• relevant internal links (which we will cover in the next section).

Designers will almost always include good navigational elements (think header, footer, and sidebar) because they are a standard part of web design. However, the other pieces operate mostly behind the scenes. Forgetting to include them can be a major impediment to making your website SEO-friendly.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is like a table of contents for your website. An HTML sitemap is a user-friendly list that visitors can use to see all your pages, and quickly find the information they need. An XML sitemap is a search engine friendly sitemap that robots use to identify and crawl the pages on your site. Both are important for being found by your target audience.

If you’re using WordPress, generating an XML sitemap is as easy as downloading the free Yoast SEO plugin, and enabling your sitemap. HTML sitemaps, on the other hand, aren’t always necessary if you have good header and footer navigation.

Creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console is a critical component of SEO for web developers. Skipping this process could severely limit traffic to your site and restrict your website’s ability to convert customers and generate revenue.

Robots

Robots.txt is a file that you can access by typing your domain name in the URL bar and appending robots.txt to the end. This is like the guest list at a high-profile event… but for robots. If a robot isn’t on the list, it can’t access your website. Meta robots are HTML tags that you can include on a page-by-page basis to restrict certain pages from being included in a search engine index.

Robots directives are important because they could accidentally restrict access to your website. For example, developers frequently use robots.txt to restrict a website while it is under development. If your website is accidentally launched without removing these instructions, you might be hiding your site from important digital stakeholders.

The scope of this post won’t get into the details around website robots, but feel free to check out this post about how to prevent Google indexing using robots directives.

Information Architecture and Site Structure

Good information architecture is a very important aspect of search engine optimization. An SEO-friendly website structure can help search engines and users understand where they are on your site. This helps to build a schema of your content that influences how well your pages rank organically.

For example, an oil and gas website design might include different products relating to upstream, midstream, and downstream processes. Consider how you might structure the URLs for a LACT unit if your site offers several products that relate to different parts of the O&G supply chain.

Your homepage URL is just your main domain name. You should optimize your homepage for the overarching theme of your website. In this case, you might optimize your homepage for “oil and gas equipment.”

The next directory down, you will include your logical subsections. For your oil and gas site, your sub-directories will look like:

• com/upstream/
• com/midstream/
• com/downstream/

The next directory down will contain each of the products as they relate to your sub-directories. The sub-sub-directory for your LACT unit would be yourdomain.com/midstream/lact-unit/. When someone visits this page, they will intuit that you have several midstream products and products for the upstream and downstream markets.

This directory structure will also help your homepage rank better for “oil and gas equipment” because search engines can see that you have an exhaustive selection of equipment for the entire O&G industry. Because of the useful content on your site, you are highly likely to satisfy the needs of a searcher.

Internal Links

Internal links are the links from one page of your site to another. Internal links are either navigational or contextual by nature.

At the 22 minute mark of this 2016 Google Webmaster Hangout, Google Spokesperson John Mueller talks about how Google uses internal links within your website. Mueller points out that contextual links within the main content of your site are treated differently than your navigational links.

Navigational links are important for search engines that need to crawl your website and index your pages. They are also important for users to explore your website and quickly find what they need.

Contextual links are important to search engines and web visitors for the same reason, but give a greater indication of what the destination page is about. This is because your link anchor text gives hints about where you will end up when you click a link.

For example, imagine that you are designing a construction company website. When Google sees a link in your footer with the anchor text “home” and the URL to your homepage, it knows that you’re linking to your homepage. When Google sees a link in a blog article about how to choose a commercial contractor that uses the anchor text “top-rated commercial construction company” and the URL to your homepage, it gives context as to what your homepage is about.

Using navigational and contextual links are both important for navigating your website. However, contextual internal links within the main content of a relevant page that use descriptive anchor text are important to your rankings. This sort of insight can help designers create a search engine-friendly web design that delights users as well.

Contact MARION for SEO Website Design Today

MARION’s team is comprised of award-winning web designers and experienced SEO strategists that can help build a high-performance website for your business. Our marketing agency has been helping businesses excel for nearly 40 years and is ready to do the same for you.

Contact us today to schedule a consultation and learn how our Houston SEO services and custom web design services can help you grow!

Your website will most likely serve as your business’s first impression for potential customers. But, advice can range dramatically from one person to another about what makes a great website–one that engages and attracts buyers, and builds confidence in your brand.

Before you can create a great website, it’s important to know what the typical customer will be interested in learning when visiting your site. If you’re a local business, it may just be that they need directions, prices, or contact information. If you offer services, your site’s visitors might be most interested in making an appointment or reading testimonials from satisfied customers.

Like it or not, in our digital world, having a great website is essential if you’re looking to grow your business. If you’re interested in learning how to make a great website, we’re here to help. Keep reading for some basic tips for creating your own website, or, for those who already have a strong online presence, we’ll help you apply effective website design concepts to your existing site.

What Makes a Great Website?

As you spend time on the web, you may not have stopped to think about what actually makes a good website. What components cause you to buy from one company’s site versus another? The elements used to create a good website likely affect visitors on a subliminal level. The best designs minimize distractions, are easy to navigate, and clearly communicate your story.

What Makes a Good Business Website?

For businesses, a good website design depends on both the information provided, as well as, aesthetics. The characteristics of a great business website have far more to do with what will turn your site visitors into paying customers than anything else.

As you’re evaluating what would make a good website design for your business, make a list of the things your customers are most likely to want when they visit your site. What do you want potential customers to know and how do you want them to feel about your business when they visit your website? Organize and present that information clearly to help build confidence in visitors. For best results, reach out to a top marketing agency like MARION for help.

3 Characteristics of a Great Website

First, whether designing a new website or updating and existing one, it’s important to consider what your customers will see. Branding is important, and a great website will consistently reinforce it. Studies show that 94 percent of first impressions of a website are design-related.

Want to take your website to the next level, but you’re on a budget? Download this free eBook with 24 website must haves that will help improve your site today!

In addition to a simple, attractive design, it’s important that your website design match other existing branding. Maybe you need to update or create branding guidelines for your business. A branding agency like MARION can help with that, too.

1. Your Website Reflects Your Business/Brand

One of the top principles of great web design is that you should update your site’s look and feel to current standards. An outdated design gives a bad impression. And, if your website is behind the times, your customers will get the impression that your products and services are, too.

2. Your Website Is Expandable If You Offer New Products/Services

Next, your website should allow for easy expansion allowing for additional products and services. As you’re researching how to format your website, notice that navigation and menu structure is vital to clearly presenting products and service to site visitors. Your sitemap needs to match the long-term goals of your business. What makes a great business website is not only that it’s great today, but that it can also expand as your business grows.

3. Your Website Is Easy to Use and Navigate

Then, make sure your website is easy to use and navigate. Potential customers should be able to easily find the information they need. An easy-to-use menu is fundamental to good web design. Creating a successful website is often something as simple as customers being able to quickly find product information, how to book an appointment, and contact information.

The top custom website design firms in Houston can help design an aesthetic and functional business website. Check out MARION’s work to see some B2B web design examples.

How to Make a Good Website

When it’s time to get started on design, it’s important to know the basics of how to make a great website. It can help to look at other business websites and evaluate what makes a great website and what doesn’t. Here are a couple of things to help get you started.

Incorporate a Good Logo, Graphics, and Consistent Branding

Consistency is key when creating a great website. Effective website design also means making sure the overall impression customers get matches your brand. Start with your logo if you already have one, and choose fonts, colors, and graphics that reinforce your brand. If you’re a law firm, the characteristics of a great website may mean simplicity and formality, whereas a day care may use fun colors and more playful fonts. If you’re hiring someone else to do your graphic design, make sure you understand the important pieces of writing a design brief for graphic designers.

If you don’t already have a logo, MARION can provide professional logo creation services. Like all things design, you get what you pay for. Don’t be afraid to invest in the future of your company by establishing an elegant logo that captures the essence of your brand.

Provide Your Company Information in the Expected Places

Customers must be able to easily find the information they need. This includes your location, contact information, and description of your products. A great website design makes that information easily accessible.

Company information is often found on an About Us page, as well as at the bottom of every page. Working with a firm like MARION that provides professional web design in Austin can help you ensure your site is as customer friendly as possible.

Make Sure Your Contact Information Is Consistent (Consistent NAP)

Make sure that contact information is up-to-date at all times. Name, address, and phone number (NAP), is an important part of SEO, and one of the most vital features of great website design. Failure to keep this information current may prevent customers from contacting you, and may also negatively affect your ranking in search results.

Build Your Site to Be Responsive

At this point, responsive web design is more than just a trend, it’s vital, and among the very basic features of what makes a website successful. As one of the most popular website design features, responsive web design simply means your pages automatically scale to fit the size of the screen, whether it’s being viewed from a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. Because mobile internet usage took the lead over desktop computers in 2018 with 63 percent of internet visits, this is one of the most important aspects of making a great website.

Optimize Your Website for SEO

If your pages don’t rank, customers won’t be able to find you. Optimizing your pages is a major component of what makes a successful website. Here is an SEO checklist for new websites that will help you implement a high-performing SEO website design.

Fast Web Page Load Speed Is Critical

Search engines want to make the browsing experience as pleasant as possible for consumers. Part of what makes a great website is fast page load speed. If your site loads too slowly, you’ll be penalized. If your graphics or videos are too large to load or begin streaming quickly, your design could be negatively affecting your company’s bottom line.

Optimize Your Website for CRO

The ability to assess conversion rates is another factor that can make a website great. Build in ways to regularly test how many of your visitors turn into paying customers. This may include A/B testing and setting up analytics to monitor how customers interact with your site. Continued CRO is a great way to get leads for your business over time.

Add Testimonials and Testimonial Videos from Customers

Effective website design means making sure visitors get what they need. If possible, include written or video reviews of your products and services on your website. Up to 70 percent of consumers check reviews before buying a product.

Text testimonials are better for your SEO efforts than using video reviews only. If you choose to use video, include a transcript to get the most out of your SEO efforts.

Secure Your Site with SSL and Firewall Protection

No features of good website design matter if your site isn’t secure. Not only are there big HTTP vs. HTTPS SEO differences, but it will drive away customers who get security alerts from their browser or virus protection software. If you aren’t sure how to get the proper security certification for your site, you can work with an experienced web developer to make sure your site is safe.

If you’re ready to create a good website for your business, trust an experienced design team. We can get you started by going through your business objectives, helping you learn more about your target audience, and creating a site that gets results. Get in touch with MARION about our web design services today.

Launching a new website is a big step for your business. Whether you’re replacing an old website or you’re breaking new ground, you stand to gain a lot from this new digital marketing tool.

Avoid the common trap that many businesses fall victim to – designing sites for visual appeal only. While sites should be aesthetically pleasing to visitors, they should also be SEO-friendly and compatible with your marketing goals.

To prevent your business from sinking thousands into an attractive but useless online catalog, learn how to start SEO for your new website before it’s too late.

9 Step SEO Checklist for New Websites

To attract your ideal customers to your site, follow these SEO steps for your new website.

1. Create a Keyword Map

Before you even begin designing new pages or laying out your site, create a conceptual map of what you hope to rank for. We call this a “keyword map,” and you can use it to develop your site structure.

To get a better understanding of keyword maps, consider this example about SEO for law firms.

Determine the main topic or several main topics that you’d ideally like to be found for. From there, build a hierarchy with those main topics at the top.

Once you have your topic map created, do keyword research to determine a list of keywords that each page should rank for. To keep things simple, each topic should have about five related keywords that you will optimize for.

A keyword map is a great example of how to start SEO for a new website. It gives you an idea of how to structure your URLs, and how many different page designs you will need for each level. If you need further guidance, consider doing a quick website SEO analysis for more details.

2. Choose Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is a critical step in the SEO process for your new website. Your domain name will be tied to your brand for years to come, and it’s difficult to start over once you’ve built SEO signals to your domain.

In step one of your SEO checklist for new websites, you identified the most important keywords for your website. Use the phrases at the top of your keyword map to influence your domain name selection.

Using keywords in your domain has been an SEO practice for over a decade. In 2012, Google introduced an algorithm update that decreased the effectiveness of using an exact keyword in your domain name (called EMDs or Exact Match Domains). Despite this algorithm update, including a keyword in your domain, and even within your business name, remains an effective way to rank well in organic search results.

If you use the law firm example above, you might decide that including “divorce law” in your domain name would be beneficial. Consider pairing your brand name and a relevant keyword together for the best results. If I were to start a law firm site, I might decide on the domain www.tonydivorcelaw.com.

3. Mobile Usability and Responsive Design

As of 2015, the majority of Google searches are conducted on mobile devices. In 2018, Google introduced mobile-first indexing for the majority of websites in their index.

If you’re designing your website for desktops and neglecting the mobile user-experience, your rankings (and potential customers) will suffer. One of the best SEO tips for a new website is to put mobile first. Google has a free tool to help you test whether or not a page is mobile friendly.

Make responsive web design the standard for your business website. Any time you build a new feature or run a promotion, make sure it looks good on your phone. This includes new landing pages, emails, or even images that you include in blog posts on your site.

If you’re using a website design company to build your new business site, check out their previous work to make sure they excel at responsive design. Follow our guide on how to choose a website designer for more tips on evaluating web designers.

Not sure what makes a great website? Download our eBook about 24 Website Must Haves to improve your website performance today!

4. Speed

As of July 2018, load speed affects SEO for new websites more than ever. On July 9th, 2018 Google announced the “Speed Update” that introduced page speed as a ranking factor for searches on mobile devices.

If your pages load slowly on mobile, your rankings will decrease, and your bounce rates will increase. The negative effect will be compounded because user signals like high bounce rate can negatively impact your rankings.

You can use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to measure your site’s load speed. This tool measures two metrics that are important to new website SEO: page speed and optimization.

Page Speed

Page speed is measured by two factors: time to first contentful pain (FCP), and DOM content loaded (DCL). FCP is the amount of time it takes for a user’s browser to produce a visual response when a page is visited. DCL is the time it takes for the actual HTML page to be loaded and parsed by a browser.

In general, FCP will be more dependent on server response times. You can use a content delivery network (CDN) or high-performance web host to increase load speeds.

A CDN creates copies of your site and houses them on servers spread across the world. This reduces the physical distance between your website and a user so that your pages load quickly. A good analogy is using an ATM instead of going to your main bank location each time you need to withdraw cash.

Your DCL will be affected by your website delivery. If you’re using a website builder or CMS like WordPress, make sure you’re using a recent version of PHP so that your website reacts and loads quickly.

The scripts and other components of your site will also take time to load. By correctly minifying, compressing, combining and placing the different resources on your pages, you can increase your DCL. This is where the optimization part of your site speed comes into play.

Optimization

Your optimization is a measure of how well you implement best practices for fast load times. Google PageSpeed Insights lists several suggestions for better speed optimization and average page load times.

Optimization factors include:

• Optimizing images
• Reducing server response times
• Eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-fold content
• Use Browser Caching
• Minifying HTML, CSS and scripts
• Enabling resource compression

For users to benefit, you need to make sure your site is optimized, and your pages are loading quickly. This will have a positive benefit on your SEO before website launch, and your users will be less likely to bounce.

5. Can Search Engines Crawl and Index?

There are some obvious components to making sure your site can be crawled and indexed. For example, check your robots.txt file to make sure you aren’t hiding important pages from search engines.

Robots.txt

To check your robots.txt file, enter the URL of your domain into your browser with robots.txt appended. If your site is at example.com, you will type the following into your browser.

https://example.com/robots.txt

Make sure that you don’t see the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This code would prevent all search engines and crawlers from accessing any part of your site. You can also see different user-agents explicitly listed with corresponding URIs (URLs without your domain name at the beginning) that you don’t want search engines to crawl.

Meta Robots Tags

Check to make sure that your important pages don’t have meta robots tags on them. I’ve heard horror stories about developers that have activated new websites with noindex/nofollow meta tags on every page. A noindex/nofollow meta robots HTML tag will look like the following.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />

Noindex means that you don’t want search engines to include your page in their index. Nofollow means that you don’t want search engines to let the links on your page pass SEO value.

Note that including meta robots tags on your page does not prevent search engines from crawling it. They can still access and read all your page content, but they won’t record it in their index.

Sometimes, even when you include a noindex or nofollow tag on a page, search engines will ignore your instructions and index the page anyway. In this situation, you can use the Google Search Console URL Removal Tool to deindex the page.

XML Sitemap

While learning how to do SEO for a new website, make sure you understand how to use an XML sitemap. Providing search engines with an XML sitemap is like adding a table of contents to a book. XML sitemaps make it easy for search engines to crawl your pages and understand what your site is all about.

If you’re using a CMS like WordPress (I highly recommend that you do), you can use the free Yoast SEO plugin to automatically create your sitemap. Any time you add or remove pages, the plugin will automatically update your sitemap so that you don’t have to make manual adjustments.

Steps 4 and 5 above involve some coding, and that can be very intimidating to business owners or marketing executives. If you need help with WordPress development in Houston, contact the experts at MARION today.

6. Set Up Tracking Codes

Make sure you can measure the effectiveness of an SEO strategy for your new website. To do this, you can use several tools.

If your company already uses a CRM or a data analytics tool, you’ll want to make sure you have the necessary integrations set up. However, if this is your first time around, here are some free tools that you can use before you start SEO for your new website.

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Retargeting Pixels for Google and Facebook

You can use the data from Google Analytics to determine which of your pages are being visited and engaged with, and where those visitors came from.

Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters tools will help with basic SEO for new websites. These tools will identify which search terms potential customers are using to find your pages, and where your pages rank. You can also use these tools to identify which of your pages are linked to the most and if there are any indexing issues on your site.

The step-by-step SEO for your new website should include these tracking tools so that you know if your marketing is effective, and where to make improvements. There are also paid tools like SEMrush, Screaming Frog and Moz that you can use when you’re ready to move beyond the basics. These tools will help you track rankings, backlinks, and identify technical SEO issues.

7. Set Up Structured Data

Structured data is coding on your website that helps search engines better understand your content.

Structured data is like having an expert witness for a court case, an operators manual for an oil and gas pump, or before and after pictures for a plastic surgeon. While these secondary pieces of information aren’t explicitly about your products or services, they add helpful context to stakeholders.

Schema, Microformats, and Open Graph Protocol are the most popular forms of structured data to include as part of your new website SEO.

Schema Markup

Marking up your pages with Schema can help you add:

• Rich Search Results (like star ratings in search engine results)
• Rich Cards
• Mobile Carousels
• Rich AMP Results
• Enriched Search Results
• URL Breadcrumbs
• Knowledge Graph

You can add Schema in the HTML of your page, or you can use JSON-LD in the head of a page. Both ways will increase the likelihood of earning special features in the SERPs. I’ve found that adding Schema to the HTML of a page is the more immediate way of getting your markup included in search results.

Microformats

Similar to Schema, Microformats is structured data markup that you can blend with your HTML to help search engines identify what your site is about.

If you’ve ever seen something like <article class=”h-entry”> in your code, this is microformat data. Microformats have many properties that can be used in almost the exact same way that you would use Schema.

Open Graph

You can use Open Graph Protocol to help influence social media sharing of your web pages. While this won’t have an explicit impact on your rankings, open graph markup gives you a say in how your content is shared on social media.

• Facebook: You can pair Open Graph with the Facebook Validation Tool to markup your content
• LinkedIn: Use pure Open Graph to markup content for LinkedIn
• Twitter: Use the Twitter Card markup to format and validate your content
• Instagram: Use pure Open Graph to mark up your content for display on Instagram

8. Create Content Before Launching

Content is another critical component of SEO for a new website. Before launching, make sure you’ve created and formatted your content for the best results.

Use your keyword map from step one to determine which pages you need to have complete before launching. Try not to leave any core products or services out when you release your new site.

If you’ve included potential blog content and help articles that are related to your industry, it’s up to you to decide if they need to be complete before launching. You may not be able to complete an FAQ page if users haven’t had time to use your services. However, you may want to prepare high-potential blogs posts for topics that most of your competitors have already written about.

Content isn’t limited to written copy. Feel free to create videos and images that are relevant to your industry as well. Rich content like images and videos can help position your brand and keep your users engaged. They also facilitate higher levels of content-sharing that could help promote your new site.

9. Launch Promotion

Steps 1-8 should lay a solid foundation for your SEO before website launch, but now you must market your creation.

While your site is being designed and developed, create a list of industry connections that could benefit from sharing your content with their network. You can partner with these contacts to run pre-launch email, social, and blogging campaigns that highlight your upcoming site.

You might already have some people in mind but look to related, non-competing sites if you’re just getting started. For example, if you’re a local business, you can leverage your chamber of commerce or surrounding businesses if you offer complementary or supplementary products/services.

In addition to partnerships, consider learning how businesses use social media to advertise. Pair social media advertisements with PPC campaigns to spread the word while you’re building your long-term digital authority for SEO.

Using a balance of paid and organic search in the early days of your website will help you generate new business leads while developing your off-page SEO foundation.

Contact MARION for Help with Your New Website SEO

MARION’s team of website designers and SEO experts have experience building custom websites that incorporate high-performing SEO strategies for new websites. Your website is only as good as the ROI it achieves, so work with a Houston marketing agency like MARION that builds sites with long-term marketing goals in mind.

Contact MARION today for more information about how our marketing and SEO company can help you grow.