Red Kite Creative

Establishing Trust

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress and SEO, Google or Facebook Ads, Blogging, Getting Testimonials

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

It’s true that WordPress is my favorite CMS (content management system). That doesn’t mean it’s the right CMS for every business. However, WordPress may be one of the best CMS platforms for SEO. Learn what makes WordPress so SEO-friendly and why it may be a good fit for your business if search engine optimization is important to you.

If you’re considering advertising your business on social media, you have some big questions to answer. One of them may be where to advertise. Are Google Ads or Facebook Ads better for your business? This is a big article with a lot of info and it may provide the answers you need to move forward with your ad buys.

Here is yet another ultimate guide to blogging, but this one from Yoast is an easy read. It covers everything from how to get started and what to write about to marketing and maintaining your blog.

Finally… I always encourage clients to collect and share customer testimonials on their websites. Whether they are within your site (my favorite plugin for managing them is Strong Testimonials) or on a third-party site like Google Reviews, it’s easy to display them on your site and gain the credibility and trust benefits. Learn how to get good testimonials from your customers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Slow Sites, Black Friday, Improving Conversions, Google Reviews, Blogging

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Think your slow-as-a-turtle website isn’t hurting your business? Think again. Google has been looking at page load time since back in 2010, and they use this information when ranking websites. A study from 2016 showed that over 50% of mobile users would abandon a site if it took more than 3 seconds to load. Do you think they’ve gotten more patient since then? Nope. Learn how a slow site impacts your business. And then take a look at our performance optimization service. We can help you stop frustrating your users!

Having a great big sale on Black Friday? It’s time to start sending emails to customers now – like, today. Learn some handy (and timely) email marketing techniques for the big day.

And speaking of the 2018 holiday shopping season… learn how to tweak your landing pages for more conversions. What’s a conversion? That’s an action you want a user to take. It usually includes things like: making a purchase; submitting a contact form; or clicking a contact link. Top tip for this season: chatbots (when done well) can be a big help to your business for both shopping assistance and customer support.

Google Reviews. You know how important they are – and how a bad review can turn your day upside down. But don’t worry… you can respond to bad Google reviews in a meaningful and effective way, and often turn them around to demonstrate how well your business responds under pressure. Hint: you should also respond to positive reviews to show you’re paying attention. The fewer reviews you have, the more important this is.

Finally… does your blog content play it safe? Is it boring? Or do you stretch your boundaries and get out of your comfort zone from time to time? If you think you’re not that kind of writer, maybe you should learn to be. How to avoid creating safe content. This is good advice for all bloggers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Thanking Customers, Old Content, Too Many Choices, Trello

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Making sure your customers know you appreciate them is an ongoing and critical task for business owners. Here are some ideas for thanking your customers from Constant Contact.

What to do with the old content on your website is another constant question. Here are some good ideas for dealing with old content from Yoast. Don’t forget that you shouldn’t just delete an old post – if the old post has good-quality links pointing to it and you have a new post that fills the shoes of the old one, you’ll need to add a 301 redirect from the old post to the newer one; or if you just really want to delete that old content forever make sure you read the part about 410 Gone.

Is your site cluttered? Does the user who arrives on the home page have any clue what they should do next? Sometimes the problem with a design is not a lack of direction, but too many choices! Studies show that the more choices a user is given, the less likely they are to get to a conversion. Learn about how to both simplify and group user choices for better results.

Finally… a non-marketing link but one that could be of great benefit to your business. Trello is one of my favorite tools; I use it for project management and my clients tend to like it because it’s so intuitive and easy to use. It’s very flexible and it’s an ideal tool for implementing the Kanban methodology from Toyota. However, it can also be used for customer support, and here’s how to do that.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Slow WordPress Dashboard, Facebook Marketing, SEO Problems, Trust

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

If you find that your WordPress admin dashboard is suddenly running a lot slower – guess what? It’s probably that plugin you installed recently. This post on 14 ways to fix a slow WordPress admin includes a list of 35 plugins known to cause dashboard slowdowns, but in case that’s not your issue, there are other things you can troubleshoot and this post will help you do just that.

If you’re using Facebook to connect to your audience, here’s a big post detailing 22 Facebook marketing tips for budget-minded small businesses. Top tip: content calendars are great for blogging, and they also seem to be a good idea for busy Facebook marketers.

This is for the SEO do-it-yourselfers. Ever had one of those really weird problems with your site rankings and no clue how to begin fixing it? This post might help. It’s an 8-point checklist for addressing strange problems with your technical SEO.

And finally… this is a really important one. Does your website inspire trust? Take a good look at it while you read this post on why and how to gain users’ trust. Does it make you look like a pro? Or an amateur? Would people want to buy from you or hire you, based on the quality of your site’s design? Are there spelling and grammatical errors that you could easily fix? Trust is critical and easily lost, but harder to gain. Food for thought.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Non-profit Newsletters, Testimonials, Improving Conversions, Calls-to-action Best Practices

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

If your business (in any industry) has an email newsletter, you might find yourself hard-pressed to find something interesting to write about every month (or week, or whatever your timetable is). Here’s a guide to developing newsletter content for non-profits that will help readers better understand and connect with you.

I always encourage clients to display testimonials on their websites – they can be a powerful persuader for potential new customers. Research shows that 70% of consumers will trust an online opinion of even someone they don’t know personally. But – there are good and bad ways to handle testimonials that impact their effectiveness. Learn how to manage testimonials.

One good way to improve conversions on your site is to make it a journey, not a set of pages with no guidance. Use a call-to-action to take your visitor where you want them to go, and use internal links to bring them deeper into your site. Get more tips on improving conversions.

And since we’re talking calls-to-action, here’s a post detailing CTA examples and best practices. See how seven other sites do it, and do it well.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Optimize Images, Seasonal Marketing, Dark Patterns, SEO Tools

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

“Optimize images” is almost always one of the recommendations when testing a slow-loading website. Optimizing means making images no larger (dimensions and resolution) that they need to be for your site to reduce loading time. It also has to do with making them findable in search engine results. Here’s a nice guide to image optimization, not too technical, that can help you get your own site loading faster.

If you run a seasonal business, marketing can be tough. Here’s a post from Constant Contact with 3 easy steps to year-round marketing for seasonal businesses that might help with ideas for email campaigns.

Ever heard of “dark patterns?” I hadn’t either until I saw this next post. Dark patterns are little user interface elements used to trick visitors into taking action, and they usually rely on you not paying attention. For example, telling you that 5 other people have the product you’re looking at in their cart already may worry you enough to buy even if you weren’t ready. Or showing you that there’s only 1 of a product left with an hourglass. It’s pressure, and it comes across as being manipulative. Here’s an overview of dark patterns and why to avoid using them. Not worth the risk IMO.

Finally… if you’re doing your own SEO (search engine optimization) monitoring for your website, there are a lot more tools out there than you may know. Here’s a review of the top 12 SEO monitoring tools for 2018.